Just about me :
Me as a Software Developer
Ever since I was really 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 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 Stanislaw 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 technologies, 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. Here’s some evidence that I do actually have some experience.
I am also some kind of a Jack of every trade. Master of either. 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.
My projects
Where To Park
Smart parking lots is exactly what we need in the 21st century. Project utilises AI and CCTV cameras in order to determine the number of available parking spaces in a given parking lot. Backend is written in Go, iOS app in Swift and Web App in Typescript and Svelte
View more information at wheretopark.app
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
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 fulfil my use-case. There are some of them
- ezsockets - Composable WebSockets made easy.
- google-smart-home - Types for Google Smart Home
- acu - Utilities for building asynchronous actors.
- szafka - Asynchronous persistent data store.
And I’ve also contributed to some