myself

As you may have already noticed my name is Michał Kwiatkowski. I'm 22 years old, raised in little town, now I live in Gdańsk. Interested in computers since old C-64 days. Most influential things in my digital education was discovery of open source (in a form of Red Hat Linux CD borrowed from my brother-in-law) and the Internet, which gave me access to vast source of information of almost any topic I could've imagined, especially computer-related. Starting with BASIC I've traveled through the worlds of several development environments and programming languages, to finally land in a world of dynamic languages, most notably Python, Ruby, Common Lisp and Scheme, but there are probably more to come. :-)

my web presence

I use a few web services quite regularly. First of all, my stream of web consciousness is on Tumblr. I save all my bookmarks to diigo. My music preferences are saved to last.fm. I blog in English from time to time on my Python blog. I write about my general programming languages interests on my Lisp blog (in Polish). And of course my homepage is a central place of all my web activity.

my school

CS is proofs (recursion), algorithms (recursion), languages (lambda calculus), operating systems (pointers), compilers (lambda calculus) -- and so the bottom line is that a JavaSchool that won't teach C and won't teach Scheme is not really teaching computer science, either.
"The Perils of JavaSchools" by Joel Spolsky

I'm during fourth year of computer science education at Gdansk University of Technology and frankly it's not about computers, certainly can't be called science, and not a real software engineering either. Our hypertext teacher publish online documents in M$ Word format and more than a half of lecturers don't know the proper pronunciation of a word "standard". Well... things don't seem to change very soon. If you want to be algorithms scientist or a so called "software architect" (aka "code is hurting my eyes") with some dedication you may be successful here. But you'll be disappointed if you want to learn practical things. Remember Mark Twain's words: "Don't let school get in the way of your education." and simply look somewhere else.

my hobbies

I like well-sounding, balanced rhytmes and sounds, sometimes called music, especially blues and jazz. List of bands I listen to is too long to quote, but I definietly can't stand hip-hop, techno or most pop productions, based on money and temporary trends. This border isn't very tight though, there're times I listen to some eletronic, alternative mixes.

I used to be strongly involved in roleplaying games few years ago, but don't have time for it these days. :( But my love to sci-fi literature is everlasting. I really enjoy reading Julius Verne, Ursula Le Guin and Philip K. Dick books.

Despite of these few interests, what I like the most is spending long nights doing some coding or learning obscure details of computer systems. Yes, I do *not* sleep often. :> When I need to relax I surf the web looking for some soothing ideas and unique insights. Although there's lot of garbage on net now, you can find some rarities from time to time.

my box

Kubuntu logo I own nice and fast Prestigio notebook, which have served me for about 2.5 years now. After trying many different open source operating systems, I've settled on Kubuntu, as a stable and robust platform for almost any computer task you may want to preform. Most notably it gives you access to vast archive of different programming languages' compilers and interpreters, as well as huge selection of libraries. During my everyday computer work I use Firefox web browser, Emacs editor (and a development environment in one package), xmonad window manager, and a bunch of web-based applications, like GMail, last.fm, Wikidot and others.

my geekcode

-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.12
  GCS/MU d-- s++:- a-- C+++$ UBL++++ P++(--) L+++
  E++> W++ N+ !o K? w--- O? !M V? PS+++ PE Y+ PGP+
  t- 5- X+@ R+@ !tv b++ DI+ D- G+ e h--- r+++ y+++
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

personality

Personality type: INTJ

  • Introverted: 78 (very expressed introvert)
  • Intuitive: 50 (moderately expressed intuitive personality)
  • Thinking: 1 (slightly expressed thinking personality)
  • Judging: 22 (slightly expressed judging personality)

Result for "Which File Extension are you?" quiz:

You are .ogg Even though many people consider you cool and happening, a lot still find that you're a bit too weird to hang out with.

Result for "Which OS are you?" quiz:

You are Slackware Linux. You are the brightest among your peers, but are often mistaken as insane. Your elegant solutions to problems often take a little longer, but require much less effort to complete.

Result for "Which Programming Language are You?" quiz:

You are Python. You are slower than others, but easier to understand. You are a minimalist, who doesn't like clutter.

contact info

The prefered way to contact me is by e-mail. You're encouraged to use my PGP public key. If you're lucky, you may also reach me through Jabber, my JID is ruby@jabster.pl. Occasionally I'm posting on Usenet.

thanks to

There are few people I want to thank:

  • Pitr, my brother in law, for showing me Linux
  • Grig for teaching me Agile and his involvement in my SoC projects
  • Michał Prokopiuk for hosting this site
  • Ignaś and Verdan, my fellow geeks, for long evenings on IRC ;)
  • Paweł for taking this great photos my design was build upon
  • Gosia for everything...
If you're doing an interesting project and need a strong programmer don't hesitate to contact me. Check my current resume and see my profile on LinkedIn.