About Me

Hi, I'm Michal. If you're curious, here is a short time line of my life.

• 1988: Born in Lublin, Poland
• 1996: Started training Karate
• 1997: My godmother sends $1000 from America and tells my parents to buy me a computer
• 2000: Learned C++
• 2002: Installed Red Hat Linux
• 2004: Read "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins, which instilled in me a love for science
• 2009: Moved to Krakow to study, but disillusioned I soon moved
• 2009: Moved to Wroclaw to continue my studies at Wroclaw University's Computer Science department
• 2010: Wrote my own operating system from scratch
• 2010: Became the administrator of longturn.net, a game of FreeCiv where one turn takes one day
• 2011: Worked as a sysadmin at the university
• 2012: Worked on xombrero, a secure web browser with vi-like key bindings
• 2012: Worked as an embedded developer
• 2012: Worked on Bitrig, an OpenBSD clone
• 2013: Worked as a hacker
• 2014: Graduated
• 2015: Moved to Edinburgh, worked with supercomputers
• 2016: Moved to Rzeszow
• 2016: Worked on OpenBSD, improving the scheduler to make YouTube work on Firefox
• 2017: Moved to Krakow
• 2018: Switched from Karate to Argentine Tango
• 2018: Quit my job and tried my chances in business
• 2018: Whatseat - first failed product
• 2018: Code Dog - first money making product
• 2019: Syften - first real money making product
• 2023: I became affluent, with abundant money and time, but not yet rich
• 2024: I dedicated this year to studying medicine

Me in 2005 installing Linux on my friend's computer:

Me in 2019 working on my products. The keyboard is a 1989 IBM Model M

My Servers

• dude.apcoh.org, 2004-2007, a FreeBSD shell server
• spock.jasminek.net, 2010-2013, an OpenBSD shell server
• filemon.jasminek.net, 2013-2015, an OpenBSD shell server
• h1.jasminek.net, 2015-2018, an OpenBSD shell server

My Products

Whatseat

Started around 05.2018. My first failed product.

Every entrepreneur starts with a failed idea. It's usually a product for a customer base that's famous for not spending any money. Maybe it's a tool to help barbers with their bookings, or maybe an app that helps you find interesting events. For me it was an app that showed the lunch menu of restaurants in Krakow. Naturally, nobody wanted to pay for it.

Code Dog

First commit on 10.08.2018. Code Dog is my first money maker.

At one of my jobs my manager would spend a few minutes each morning pinging engineers to merge their PRs. It was neither fun nor productive. But what if I could automate it?

An app for GitHub already exists, so I solved this problem for GitLab and BitBucket.

See https://code-dog.app.

GeekMail

First commit on 05.05.2019. My second failed product.

I didn't just want to send automated welcome messages to my users, I wanted to learn about them first. GeekMail creates a draft in Gmail, allowing me to customize the message for each user.

Unfortunately soon after I released the app Google enforced a more strict policy for Gmail apps. Because I couldn't affort the "$15,000 - $75,000" required to undergo a security check by Google I stopped working on this project.

Syften

First commit on 28.05.2019. My second money maker.

To grow Code Dog I wanted to learn more about my niche. I wrote an app that notified me when my keywords were mentioned on Hacker News, Reddit etc. It turned out that other people were happy to pay for this service as well! I got my first user on 02.06.2019, just a few days after my first commit. I'm currently focused on growing this tool.

See https://syften.com.