I’ve been working on something big that is scheduled to land on my blog soon and I encountered an interesting problem. I wanted to put a piece of HTML code in a selected place alongside the post content, preferably without client-side JavaScript. An hour later I arrived at a solution I deem good enough, but since it’s now living rent-free in my head and I’m a heartless landlord when it comes to my brain space, here goes.

Some time ago, during one of agile rituals at work we were asked by our new scrum master to introduce ourselves and share some details about us, as well as our most life-changing moment. My catalog of life-changing experiences is fairly limited (or my memory is slowly failing), but I didn’t want to mention the same mundane things as the rest of my team. Instead, I opted for something enigmatic: I wrote ‘Excel spreadsheet’ with a smiley face.

Urodził się w 1924 roku. Miał 9 lat gdy Hitler przejmował władzę. Na wojnę poszedł jako szesnastolatek.

When I was single-digit years old, my tiny home town still used landline telephony with manual switchboards. My parents had to raise the receiver, wait for some human operator to pick up, say the number they wanted to call out loud, and wait for the operator to do whatever magic necessary. Not that I cared about things this mundane back then, but I saw this scene so many times it’s engraved in my memory.

It’s that time again. Long-neglected blogs raise from the dead for one day. So, without further ado, let me join in the crowd and summarize my 2023. That was a weird year and I’m careful about my expectations about 2024.

So uhm, yeah, I got an iPhone after years of using Android. But I’m not going to nerd about iPhone’s awesomeness nor complain about its lack of flexibility (maybe a little bit?). I want to talk about the most basic personalization feature that makes any new phone feel like it’s my phone: setting custom audio files as tones for calls and text messages.

Apart from software development and photography, the other ‘big thing’ in my life is translating various texts from English to Polish. As a volunteer translator I have contributed dozens of big and small bits to many software and writing projects. It’s a fun and satisfying effort that brings tangible benefits to my fellows while introducing tricky challenges I don’t typically deal with elsewhere.

I often see online platforms come and go. However, last night I realized I don’t remember the last time I witnessed any platform, whether a website or a video game, dying right before my eyes. I’m very much unused to this strange sensation when I read an announcement stating that a place I visit daily will cease to exist after a specific date.

Once in a while, someone tells me my English is better than of many native speakers. That compliment, while flattering, hits a very sensitive string in my soul. It proves that I succeeded at something. But it also reminds me this is much bigger deal than it looks and we need to talk about it.

In 2013 for the first time I went on vacation by the Baltic Sea. It was also the beginnings of my fascination with photography, so a monopod, a DSLR and a bunch of lenses took a lot of my luggage space.