Writing this post, I wanted to take you, dear reader, on a journey through history. My journey has been intertwined with computers for as long as I can remember. My first encounter with a computer was around 1990, during a vacation spent at my grandmother’s in a town near my hometown. It was then that I first saw a Commodore 64 – it was the first computer that looked nothing like today’s. Connected to a cathode-ray tube television and equipped with a cassette tape player, it allowed various games to be run on the computer. Cassettes were the most common form of program and game storage at that time, and games themselves could be recorded directly from the radio! Special broadcasts on Polish radio were the form of free software distribution long before the first iPhone, let alone the AppStore.
Despite all the games available on the Commodore 64, I was most interested in the command line and the way to issue instructions for this device. A 5-year-old child, fascinated by a device so archaic by today’s standards.

Later, at the age of 10, I first laid eyes on Windows 95. The PC emitted such familiar and positively ingrained sounds in my mind like the hard drive’s clicks with a capacity of 512 Megabytes, the sound of the fan in the case, the noise of the CD drive reading a game disc, and the sound of negotiating a Dial-up Internet connection.

It was incredible.
It still wasn’t my computer – I got one a bit later. Before that happened, I had the opportunity to use an Amiga 500 at my cousin’s place. Floppy disks containing loads of games, programs, and computer demos, like Desert Dream and later AmigaDOS, were something incredible.

To this day, I remember the sound of the crackling floppy drive, with its head jumping around looking for the right sector to load the next piece of code.
Shortly thereafter, consoles took over in Poland – counterfeit versions of the Nintendo NES and SNES – called Pegasus. Along with my cousins, we spent so much time playing games loaded from cartridges that it’s hard to remember them all. The one that stands out the most to me is Dragon Fighter, because of its music and incredible story.

A guy who fights with sword and magic against aliens and turns into a dragon! When I think about it, I get a tear in my eye. The game itself was incredibly demanding – when your life bar fell to zero, it was Game Over. After 3 game overs, you couldn’t continue and had to start the whole game from the beginning.
Later, classics like Contra, Tetris, Tiny Toons, and Ducktales made the vacations truly unique.
A bit later, in 1997, I got my first PC. It was a Pentium 75 with Windows 95, 16 MB RAM, 54x CD ROM, and a floppy but no internet or even a modem. Simply, the Internet was not the most essential need in the life of a school-age person at that time. My parents – completely non-computer people – didn’t need this device and the astronomical phone bills for “fun”.
I broke my computer after 2 days, trying to free up some disk space by deleting the System32 folder from the C:\Windows directory. Of course, Windows 95 allowed me to do this without a problem, as every user in this system was an Administrator/Root when the system was configured as standalone (not connected to an NT domain controller). My parents concluded that since I broke the computer, I also had to fix it myself. And so I actually started. That’s when I learned that having a CDROM to install the operating system wasn’t standard then, and a bootable MSDOS floppy disk with an ATAPI CDROM driver was required.

Of course, none of my friends had any idea what I was talking about when I wanted to create such a disk with them. My uncle, who knew about these things, helped me out and uploaded a disk image for me. That’s also when I learned to read the Windows 95 manual to learn how to install the system from scratch. Floppy in the drive, “format C:”, cd D: and then “setup.exe”. And it went. I installed the operating system myself and put the computer back together at the age of 11. That was something – a lot of satisfaction.

Later, I started digging into the BIOS settings, curious about what all these parameters meant and why the processor’s multiplier was set to such a low value. It turned out that by playing with the multiplier, I could overclock my Pentium 75 to 90 MHz without losing system stability. Everything worked as it should, and the processor maintained a good temperature.

During this time, I learned about DOS batch files (BAT) and what io.sys is used for. I could prepare my own boot disks that performed various actions! So, the first programming language I got acquainted with was DOS batch, and the dinosaur-known “@echo off” as the prefix of every script.

In 1999, on my aging Pentium 75, Windows 98 appeared; I also added memory up to 32 MB RAM (SIM) and RivaTNT2 allowed me to comfortably play Unreal Tournament.

At this age, my computer science classes at school also began. While other children learned how to copy files to floppy disks (everyone had to have their own), how to make folders, how to write documents in Word and insert WordArt into the document, these topics didn’t excite me at all. I definitely wanted the teacher to show me more serious things. That’s how I got to know the “Logo” programming language, and I practiced typing on “Keyboard Master”. Both went very well for me, so I quickly moved on and got to know Delphi. However, this was not due to the progress of school education, but due to the Borland Delphi 2.0 application included with one of the computer magazines that added discs with various software utilities.

Delphi Desktop 2.0 was just a full, free version of the IDE and allowed me to get to know the world of Object Pascal. In 1999, I also wrote my own HTTP server using the TSocket (TCP Socket) component. It turned out that in Object Pascal, creating HTML documents “on the fly” and throwing them out on a socket is very simple, and since I wanted to find out how an internet browser works, this topic was very interesting to me. After a few hours, I had a server ready that, upon pressing the “START” button, listened on port 80. When it received a connection from a browser, it totally ignored the request and sent plain HTTP including headers, two new line characters, and the HTML document content. That’s how my adventure with WWW pages began.

Digging further during computer science classes at school on the Internet, I learned about the Apache server, PHP, and how CSS works. Before I knew it, I had created my own page, uploaded it via FTP to one of the free hosting services that were sprouting up like “mushrooms after the rain” in the Polish Internet, all with the help of a floppy disk, which contained all the HTML and CSS code of the page, which I could transfer from home to school to place it under my own subdomain.

My computer science teacher observed my endeavors and entered me into a competition for creating a website. As a 13-year-old kid, I took 2nd place in the region. I didn’t think at the time that it went the best for me, because, one – I still had a lot to learn, and two – I was only 13 years old and the self-made graphics in Paint Shop Pro (also for free from a magazine disk) let’s be honest – were not of the highest quality. But looking back on it now – it was something big. I had no support in this area, I had to acquire all the knowledge myself, I spent a lot of time learning while my peers were creating documents in Word or doing many interesting social things.

In the year 2000, I started high school, my computer was still the old Pentium 75 overclocked to 90 MHz but it definitely handled Windows 2000 – the first of the NT series, with beautiful shadows and utilizing a 24-bit color palette in 1024×768 resolution! At school, we used Windows Me, mainly to play Unreal Tournament over the network when the teacher “didn’t see”. When he saw, everyone was writing programs in Pascal… Turbo Pascal. Under DOS. Geez, how inefficient that was. Boring loading of the CGA driver to display graphics at calculator resolution. But I knew that the graphics card in this computer could do more – definitely more. Then came the assembler embedded in Pascal and initiating interrupt 10H:

program SetVesaMode;
uses
  Dos;

procedure SetGraphicsMode(mode: word);
begin
  asm
    mov ax, 4F02h   { VESA Set Mode }
    mov bx, mode    { VESA mode number}
    int 10h         { Graphics Card BIOS interrupt }
  end;
end;

begin
  SetGraphicsMode($105);
end.

In this way, from DOS, I had access to a resolution of 1024×768 with 256 colors (VESA). Pascal with an assembler addition became more interesting, especially when my high school homeroom teacher, who was a computer programmer, noticed what Mierzwiński was up to, while everyone else was using CGA (320×200).

The teacher quickly shifted me towards the C language, and I must admit, I missed Pascal and Object Pascal (Delphi) for some time, but C was very interesting – especially because of the Dev-C++ IDE for Windows. How slowly it compiled on my old machine.

From my Pentium 75, I switched in 2002 to a Celeron 2.0. This processor, sitting on socket 478, was clocked at 2 GHz, but it had relatively little second-level cache (L2 Cache) of only 128 KB. That’s little. Adding to that, it supported only one core and one thread, making it a rather slow processor even for those times. Nonetheless, it suited my hobbyist purposes perfectly. My computer also got a Motorola 56K Dial-Up Modem, and I assembled the whole setup myself. Internet in the afternoons also became something normal, although it definitely looked different from today’s internet.

The year 2003 was a time of drastic development of the Internet in Poland. While ICQ reigned in the States, in Poland Gadu Gadu was on top.

When you returned from school, you would turn on the Internet, set Gadu-Gadu to “available” mode, and all your friends knew you were available to chat. It was the era of text messages, emoticons, and many hours after school spent on Gadu. At this time, my interests focused on C++ for desktop, PHP for Web, HTML, and CSS. JavaScript was gaining more popularity, so it also found a place on my page. Visit counters, comment widgets embedded on the page, and my own forum were something. In those days, adding a contact form on a website that sent you an email was very simple because the Email message handling system was straightforward. Gmail was not yet a significant player—at least not in Poland. I remember that I did not like Google. I preferred AltaVista (later acquired by Yahoo!).

In 2004, during a boring summer in front of the computer, I met my future wife on one of the chats. We quickly exchanged Gadu-Gadu numbers, which was normal in Poland, and we started our joint adventure with computers. She played The Sims while I tinkered with my programs.

In 2005, I passed my high school final exams and chose Informatics as an additional subject. This might not have been so strange, except for the fact that I was studying in a microbiology program, had just won an important microbiology competition, and had been granted open doors to one of the best universities in Poland. However, I didn’t want to continue in the direction of Microbiology and treated it as a “plan B”. I was the only one in school to take the Informatics exam, and for the final test, I had to write a program in C. I wrote it, passed, and got an excellent grade. A good grade in Mathematics coupled with Informatics helped me get into Physics in Katowice. The University of Silesia in Katowice, Faculty of Mathematics, Physics, and Chemistry. The city next to my now-wife’s city allowed me to continue my studies close to her, and she got into Law, which was practically next to my faculty building. Mainly, Informatics at the University of Silesia was taught in Sosnowiec, and I was not fond of Sosnowiec, even though I had lived there for several years. After a year of physics, I transferred to Informatics. Physics was a coincidence – at the time of my application, all places for Informatics in Katowice were already taken, but there were still places available in Physics. Since Physics is super (and I still have great respect for people who chose this scientifically challenging field), I chose it too. However, transferring to Informatics was the best choice for me in terms of my education. Because I was already familiar with C and C++, I could focus on more interesting things than leveling with the rest of the students in my year. Together with a friend, who already had extensive experience in C++, we were encouraged by a teacher to embark on the path of Qt 3 and later Qt 4. Signals, slots, and a lot of ready-made code made writing desktop applications trivially easy. Qt also opened the doors for me to write applications for Linux, and so from Windows, I switched to the hefty Mandriva and then to Slackware. Slackware was the main operating system on my computer practically throughout my studies.

During the studies, I registered my own business and entered the job market as an entrepreneur – programmer, taking orders for websites written in PHP, applying skins to existing CMS systems, etc. Work partly on the backend, partly on the frontend. One of the orders turned into a product that I offered commercially. A PHP system for managing small hotels – and I had customers for my own hand-written program.

During the studies, everyone was learning about neural networks and writing software in Python. A language completely different from the others, totally not my style, and to top it off, perfectly promoted by the author in his book through the words “the slowest programming language of all”. That’s how I wrote my exam neural network in… Java. Static methods were perfectly suited to create a fast-learning network, which provided excellent results for our very limited problem that we had to solve. I still don’t like Python to this day, and I was the only one in the year to create an application in Java, and it worked, to the surprise of my machine learning teacher.

The contracting market in Poland was quite large, but as my skills improved, I acquired steady clients for whom I provided services managing local office networks. Running new cable segments, terminating Ethernet cable ends, replacing switches, repairing printers, upgrading computer hardware, and upgrading from Windows 98 to Vista were all in a day’s work. Soon, offices were equipped with Gentoo Linux servers featuring mirrored disk arrays and file sharing via Samba (Windows Network). It was a true revolution—both technical and educational. However, when office staff realized that their domain accounts could be accessed from any machine in the office, that files were in their place and could be sent directly instead of being attached to emails, the lives of office workers changed indescribably.

In 2008, I prepared a hosting server for one of the offices, which I colocated at a node in Krakow. It was a beast—a dual-processor motherboard, 64 GB RAM, 4 hard drives in RAID 10 configuration, secured on the rooftop of a skyscraper in the center of a gigantic city. BGP – a internet backbone routing nightmare.

In 2010, I joined my Wife, who was starting her own company dealing with social media, internet promotion, and contracts with very large companies. PHP, Java, C++, and OpenCV, Facebook, GraphAPI… and so on. It was the time of advertising campaigns, CPM, CPC, and dozens of applications supporting the promotion of brands on the Internet, interaction with customers, and connecting the real world with the virtual – online. We started with Facebook as evangelists when no one else was doing it yet. It was also a time of learning and finally creating over 30 mobile applications for Android, which guaranteed us passive income for several years. For a few years, we managed, but the number of orders and applications to maintain quickly made what gave us a lot of freedom into a torment, taking up 16 hours a day and weekends. Young, wanting more from life and inexperienced in scaling a business, we changed strategies.

In 2014, I started working at one of the programming companies in Silesia. The experience I gained led me to a position as a senior programmer. The job was enjoyable and also unlocked us for a while from the stress we had experienced in the previous months. Working at this company brought me many new experiences, working with new technologies but also implementing many of them myself. When I joined the company, it was based on Java 7, JBoss, Java Servlet Faces, and PrimeFaces. XML everywhere. When I left, I left the company with projects based on RESTful web services using Java 8 and Spring Framework, a separate frontend communicating with the backend through JavaScript, XHTTPRequest, and JQuery. A drastic change.

In 2015, I started working in Krakow at EPAM Systems as a Software Lead. Java, Spring Framework, and separate frontend. Plus a team and a lot of training to prepare for the upcoming promotion to manager level. In a very short time, thanks to the excellent support of an incredible team at EPAM, where I still have many friends and hold the company in high regard, I built an incredible base of knowledge and experience. A mass of excellent specialists – friends, friends, and simply my Leaders, whom I supported with all my might so they could show what they were capable of and achieve more! I am proud of the team I managed to build there and the friendships I made. Working with foreign clients, team development, coaching studies, developing the new Katowice branch of the company, and finally moving to the States.

The United States was not our idea. We wanted to relocate within Europe, close to family – Great Britain, maybe Sweden. Unfortunately, the company needed me more in the USA and looking back at what the then-new Manager from the States achieved in our family’s life – it was an excellent choice. Working in the States looks completely different than in Europe. It has its drawbacks and advantages, but when the company “pulls you” to the cradle of the Internet – Silicon Valley, you stop noticing these drawbacks. The States taught me a lot, opened my eyes to many problems that large countries face, that California itself faces. Yet after so many years, I feel at home here. Because this is home.

In 2023, wanting to try something new, with experience as a Delivery Manager working with many clients, responsible for the development of technology, software, and relationships with the client himself, I decided to look around. Temporarily, I said goodbye to my friends and started a new chapter in my career as a Senior Manager at MagicLeap – a company creating exceptional things by amazing specialists. I had previous experience with AR, from the days working with my wife – the Foursquare App from Foursquare Labs Inc. – however, what MagicLeap is doing is truly incredible. I am part of a team that is changing the world by combining technology with problems encountered in reality, and that is the real power of AR.

Where the road will take me further – I don’t know. We will see. To be continued.