Me

Hi, my name is Mikołaj. I've been born and raised in Poland, lived there for around 27 years. In 2014 I've decided that

I'm going on an adventure.

I flew to the land Down Under, quite literally to the other side of the world, where I started and still continue my flipped life.

I don't have a hobby per se, but I do like to travel, see and do things that I haven't done yet. I'm not going to be very original here but I also really enjoy spending time with my friends. Having a good laugh over a beer on the beach is something that fuels me up for another week of coding. Speaking of which, I'm guilty of spending quite significant amount of my spare time in front of a keyboard - usually writing some code...

In short, I'm a simple dude who likes to relax in a good company and occasionally will write an app or a blog post.

My Dev Story

Without getting into much details why, I've been interested in computers since I remember. However, in the early years, when I was a teenager, the interest focused mainly on gaming... I still remember when for the first time in my life I stayed up all night, playing Counter Strike. Those were the days...

I got my first programming book when I was in the secondary school. It was a Visual Basic book, I remember it very vaguely though, as I was still stuck in the "gaming mode" phase of my life. Nevertheless, that's the time when I wrote my very first application. Following this book guidelines, I created an almighty calculator! From memory, I think I finished only addition, subtraction, multiplication and division functionality. I was quite proud of myself, as it was a form with buttons, inputs and labels. Looking pretty ugly but for me it was magnificent!

Fast-forward in time and I'm in the senior year of high school, sitting at the desk at the computer science classes, trying to implement a quicksort in turbo-pascal using a divide and conquer methodology. Mainly though, when the teacher wasn't paying attention, we were playing Delux Ski Jump - back then a very popular game in Poland. Next stop was at the University, at the first semester we had some C++ classes, where we basically learned how to use loops, conditional statements, arrays and how to print something out on the console. The real programming adventure has started around 6th semester of my studies, when I got acquainted with C#.

I was truly amazed by .NET and C#. There was no need to think about releasing any memory (Garbage Collector was doing everything for you) and what's even more important, there were no pointers at all - praise the Lord! These days can be remembered as days of writing all sorts of Console and Windows Forms applications. I was a god of Debug.WriteLine and Debug.ReadLine, no doubts about it. There were however some more sophisticated projects. In one of them I used the XNA framework to write a small rat race simulation - which was a lot of struggle but even more fun!

My Career

One could say, that my professional career has started at the beginning of the last semester at the Uni. A friend of a friend asked me to help a company with their web project. These were one of the most hectic days of my life. I needed to juggle with time between writing my thesis, learning for the final exam and getting to know ASP.NET, HTML, CSS and JavaScript... Not to mention that there were parties almost everyday at the dormitory.

After graduating, I continued working on the same web project, a golf booking platform, for about a year and a half. Another year and a bit after that I spent coding a smart electro-energetic metering system, also in ASP.NET Web Forms, HTML, CSS and of course JavaScript. Somewhere along the way, I realised that I'm not very fond of doing web front-end anymore. That's when I started to get my hands on Windows Phone.

I was learning how to use Blend, I started using XAML and I was generally trying to understand how to develop for Windows Phone. All of that done in my spare time, as I was still punching in JavaScript to make money. When I finished my first app - a torch - and I submitted it to the store, I was super proud! It was one of a thousand torch apps out there, but I didn't care, this one was mine, with my name on it! Achievement unlocked! Thanks to this app and my irresistible charm (kidding, it was only my charm!), I was able to lock a dream job at Built to Roam. I was working with the best there are on Windows and Windows Phone apps and I was getting paid for it - it couldn't be better. On top of that we were using all the goodies from Microsoft Azure. Unfortunately,

all good things must come to an end.

Soon after I started getting pretty good at creating Windows Phone apps, the platform died.

I stayed in the mobile space and wanted to work with C#, therefore we started investing heavily in Xamarin. Since then, I have worked on variety of different apps using Xamarin Native and Xamarin.Forms. I even created two of my own apps, which are available on all three platforms:

Majority - if not all - of the apps that I have worked on were using some of Microsoft Azure cloud capabilities (e.g. Active Directory, Functions, Storage, Vault etc.). I have also set up dozens of Azure DevOps build and release pipelines. Built app packages were usually being deployed to the HockeyApp and nowadays they end up in the AppCenter. To ensure that I stay on top of the latest and greatest with Xamarin, I took Xamarin University courses and I can proudly say that I'm a certified Xamarin.Forms developer since 2017.

Currently I still work predominantly with Xamarin.Forms, but I'm really intrigued by the Google's new baby - Flutter. I must admit, after some time spent programming in Dart, I'm truly in love with Flutter's hot reload and how beautiful the apps can look with very little effort. All of that excitement around Google's new cross-platfrom framework lead me to write some Kotlin code, which resulted in co-creating a device calendar plugin.

The Future

Nobody can predict what will tomorrow bring, but I can definitely tell you that the times couldn't be better to be a mobile developer. It's very exciting to hear, read and use all of these newly arising technologies and freamworks, that open up new opportunities and possibilities. It is truly great to be a part of it...