Grzegorz Baranski
18yo software developer and a high school student

Hi, My name is Grzegorz, or Gregory if you prefer. I'm 18 years old, and I live in Gdańsk, Poland.

Despite still being a high school student, I have been home-schooled since September 2022. This decision was made in order to gain freedom and to make the most of my time, rather than wasting it in a traditional school setting where I often found myself sleeping or just staring at the ceiling instead of gaining valuable knowledge.

I made the decision to move out of my parents home at the age of 17, in order to save time commuting and gain greater freedom, as living in the countryside introduces a lot of restrictions of different kind. To make a living, I engage in freelance work such as mobile app development, website design, and cryptocurrency trading bots

But that's not really what I like to do, I dream of having a future where I can work on my own projects, and make a living out of it. I've already come to realize that money isn't the be-all and end-all; I'd like to do something that I am passionate about.

Ever since I was young, I've been really interested in computers, but my serious programming endeavors didn't start until I was 15, in December 2019, a few months before the pandemic began. It was the perfect time; when schools closed in March 2020, I had a lot of free time, and since I lived in the countryside, I didn't have many activities to occupy my time, since all my friends lived a few kilometers away.

I worked hard, averaging between 12 and 14 hours a day, on my own home automation system, just to streamline some routine I had to do 5 minutes before every shower, it was turning on the water heater, and because the button to do so was in the bathroom, I had to get up from my warm bed. My brother Stanisław had a great influence on me; he was the one who supervised me, and helped me if I had some technical issues.

And because of the intense work I put in during that time period, you shouldn't really compare someone's experience based on months of work. While I was working all day, constantly learning something new, others were coding legacy programs in ancient languages, doing the same thing they did a week, month, or even a year ago, essentially learning nothing.

It lasted for nearly two years, after which I gradually began to balance my social life with my passion and work. I'm happy and I don't regret a single minute; I took full advantage of the opportunity I was given.

My own me doesn't allow me doing the same job all the time, because I can get bored easily, I tend to seek for a perfect solution to a given problem, trying various approaches.

That's why one of my projects Houseflow was rebuilt from scratch 5 times, each time with a different idea. I get the most fun out of a project when it's new.

Business

For a significant portion of my life, I have been striving for financial independence, and as such, I am always on the lookout for new opportunities. I have had several attempts at entrepreneurship, which have given me valuable experience and knowledge.

Favourites

Quotes

Books

Projects

Houseflow

A home automation platform, it's primarly written in Rust and Kotlin. For network communication WebSocket is being used.

Historically it used to be written in languages like Go and TypeScript, while also making use databases like MongoDB, which was eventually replaced with PostgreSQL and Redis. On the front-end side I made use of React and Flutter.

Over time I found those technologies inadequate for my problem.

github.com/gbaranski/houseflow

Where To Park

The ultimate parking lot assistant, backend is written is Rust, Web-app with Svelte, iOS app with Swift, and the Android app with Kotlin.

View more information at wheretopark.app

Cryptogram

Decentralized P2P messaging app. Allows real-time messaging without a server.

Made using Go programming language and LibP2P.

github.com/gbaranski/cryptogram

Quizizz-cheat

Cheat for quizz.com, a website on which teachers can create quizzes and students can take them.

I made it possible to reveal correct answers to the question, so you can get 100% of a test without any effort.

Used to have few thousands unique visits on the GitHub repo back when schools were closed during the pandemic.

github.com/gbaranski/quizizz-cheat

Racer

Program written in Rust that watches cryptocurrency prices, and makes triangular arbitrages if profitable. Unfortunately it's closed source.

Other

I've made some libraries in order to support the rest of the community, and fulfill my use-case. There are some of them

And I've also contributed to some