Welcome, friend!

tl;dr

Jump directly to Takeaways.

This post will possibly help you see the value you could get from the blog for yourself — for free.

Below I introduce myself and show my path — that’s started in late 2006 — of getting to the spot which I’m in currently. Please bear with me for the next few minutes 🙃

In the future posts, I’ll be describing many approaches and techniques on how to work the smart way and remain focused.

I’m TKO

My full name is Tomasz Kopacki, but people used to have too much trouble in trying to call me this way. And hence — surprise, surprise — I became TKO.

I’ve been working in the web industry since October 2006. Over these years, I’ve been going through a few stages. I’ll briefly sum them up below — I hope you’ll like it.

Learning the ropes / 2006–⁠2010

High school times! You don’t know yet what to do with your life, or do you? I believe I knew. The Internet was becoming popular, and I liked it. And that’s why I started following activities:

• transforming the PSD files into the HTML/CSS-based static sites,
• creating simple full-stack solutions powered by PHP, MySQL and Apache,
• exploring and utilising dynamic website elements (called DHTML back in the day) from the Dynamic Drive,
• saving the time and effort by using jQuery extensions,
• working remotely as a freelance and helping individual clients.

Do what you like, but think long-term. Don’t start with making money and thinking only of it.

Focus more on what keeps you excited. The money part will come once you’re good at what you like doing.

Things get serious / 2010–⁠2015

I decided to study at Wrocław University of Science and Technology, and after 5 years, I graduated from it with a master’s degree in the field of computer science. During these 5 years I:

• joined an internship program at Volvo IT for 3 months — after all, it turned out to be full 10 months working on SPA project in Angular.js and Marionette.js,
• moved to a fintech company and worked on an internal system for Santander Bank; had been engineering .NET MVC-powered services.

International adventures / 2015–⁠now

I spent a long time working with the international teams from Sweden and Spain while living in Poland. Now it was about going abroad, and it was A BIG DEAL!

Dubai

I had an opportunity to live in Dubai and work on projects for Emirates. It was a massive change in my life, but I enjoyed it. I could learn heaps about web accessibility, which was an essential product requirement. I value this particular time as I could prove myself that being assertive can help to improve the quality of the final product.

Wrocław

I came back to the city I had been living in since 2010 when I started my studies. Late 2017, I was lucky to become part of the team working for Finder. It’s a fintech mixed with e-commerce. I could gain more full-stack experience and learn a very new way (at least for me) of seeing reality as an opportunity. That’s the Australian way of thinking. They say:

No worries, mate.

I started thinking: what if I lived in there? Well, I didn’t have to think long. My wife and I talked about it, and we wanted to try!

After working for 12 months from Wrocław, I packed my stuff and got both of us heading Australia!

Sydney

And here we are. Late 2019, I’ve been working for Finder for over 3 years already. Things at work are getting more and more demanding.

The company is growing rapidly each year. This allows me to work more on solving problems in areas of:

• scalability,
• security,
• performance,
• user experience.

Recently I’ve been working a lot on designing the systems architecture and providing the product quality. My day to day work got somehow more complicated and thanks to that more organized.

Takeaways

1. Do what you like, but think long-term.
2. Focus more on what keeps you excited.
3. Being assertive can help to improve the quality of the final product.
4. Try seeing reality as an opportunity.
5. And you know what? No worries, mate!

Thanks for reading and… I’ll see you in the next post 🙃