About Me & Codomaniac
Welcome at Codomaniac - a technical blog for curious people.
I’m Piotr, I’m a 32-year-old software developer living in the small city of Pszczyna in Poland.
To start things out, let me walk you throughout my past, so you can see how Codomaniac came into existence, and also, what’s in it for you.
Let „The Origin” story begin…
I was born in 1994 in Cracow, Poland, as a first child of a modest family. My parents managed to buy us a working computer when I was about 10. That computer got me hooked into early internet, gaming, and though it, into programming. I gamed a lot back then, and one of the games I stumbled into was called Colobot. It was a post-apocalyptic game developed by a Swiss studio Epsitec SA about an astronaut that has to fight ants, mine, build structures, and weaponry to fight them. It had one interesting aspect in it - it allowed you to program robots to do mining or fighting for you using custom built programming language called CBOT that resembled C++ and Java. That was the first touch I had on writing simple programs and it was fun to see the results of it.
I wrote my first „real” computer program in a middle school using Turbo Pascal on a rusty computer that my school had won in a TV show back in the 90s. They had been used since then to teach basics of programming, and I was fortunate enough to attend those lessons. That program was just a plain print statement, but something changed in me back then - a new, fascinating world opened up I could influence and interact with.
That spark followed me to choose a technical high school, where over the four years I learned more about IT, operating systems, and programming in general. For the last decade since then, I’ve been a backend developer. The majority of the work I did was related to PHP and its ecosystem. I worked my way up from WordPress and Magento frameworks to the challenges with Symfony. The latter helped me to get my feet wet in software architecture and system design. I’ve met amazing people, but the initial spark started to fade. Work got repetitive and mechanical. I started to stagnate. Soon enough, all of that was about to change.
The Layoff #
In October 2024, the company I worked at did a mass layoff. Half of the workforce was let off, along with me. With a 3 month notice period, I faced a choice. I could either look for a new job in PHP (a safe bet), or try something that interested me for some time, but was risky: pivot and start working with Go. I’ve decided to give that pivot a chance.
Despite having no professional experience in Go at the time, I spent three months preparing, ruthlessly job applying, and trying to prove that engineering principles I learned by far can translate to any language. By March 2025, I went through successful interview loop and got an offer. I’ve now been working with Go for nearly a year (as of Jan, 2026). 1
Reigniting The Spark #
I realized during my unemployment that I missed learning new things.
Following my interests in Go, I stumbled on ThePrimeagen content on YouTube. Prime in turn, got me interested in neovim. Pretty soon I also transitioned from Ubuntu to Arch + Hyprland. That is when YouTube recommended me Bread on Penguins channel. Tinkering and setting up everything from scratch on my own, based on what I needed and/or wanted was new to me, but… it was so fun! The knowledge needed to glue various pieces together is intimidating. I knew that there were already ready-to-use solutions like Omarchy but having everything set up by someone out of the box wasn’t the reason I moved away from Ubuntu in the first place. I wanted the harder path of learning the tooling and setting it up to my own taste and by my own rules. I wanted to understand how it works.
This leads us to the core of Codomaniac:
Codomaniac is for those, who aren’t satisfied that something “works”, but want to know how it “works”. It is a place for people wanting to know more about software, dive deeper, polish their technical fangs, enrich their understanding, and connect with like-minded individuals, to grow together as a community.
Well… that is something I envision it to be, since this blog is just starting out.
Note: I’m not an expert or guru of any kind, and I don’t want to be perceived as such. In fact, the longer I work in tech, the more I see of what I still don’t know. That realization comes the mixture of excitement and anxiety. I’m highlighting this to say that I’m not perfect know-it-all type of guy on the internet, and I’m here to learn as well.
Sincerely,
Piotr Rusin
P.S. I’d really like to know who you are and what brings you here. What is your current role, what are you interested in, and what challenges are you facing right now? Reach me at piotr@codomaniac.com and let’s talk :-)