I'm Sebastian Opałczyński — senior engineer, fractional CTO, absurdist craftsman from Warsaw.
17+ years in software. 2x CTO, 2x founder, 2 exits.
A short, mildly tedious chronology:
- Silicon Valley programmer (remotely, mostly, but the deserts around Las Vegas are beautiful)
- started as a pythonista
- learned backend
- then learned devops
- then learned architecture
- then learned cloud
- then used k8s when it was young
- then learned data warehouses
- and GIS, because why not
- then led the tech team at a Swiss fintech
- then said to myself: too much IT is too much IT
- ...and started making furniture from wood
- yet I still like to solve IT problems — the bigger the better
- in my free time I write essays
- and poetry
- ride a motorbike while listening to metal
- have a Star Wars Lego collection in my toilet
- see? I never learned frontend
- I use AI for that now (not only)
- what a time to be alive
These days I work as an AI-assisted engineer and fractional CTO. I help companies ship in real codebases — greenfield and legacy — without losing their architecture along the way.
I write about it at opalczynski.com and offer consulting through the-one.dev.
I work as a HI-C (high-impact individual contributor): solo, end-to-end, AI-assisted, opinionated. I deliver outcomes, not headcount. My PRs are AI-generated; my decisions are not.
A few of my opinions, calibrated by years:
- AI friction is a diagnostic signal for codebase quality
- The bottleneck in 2026 is decision-making, not execution
- Simple code beats clever code at every scale that matters
- The best craft outlives its maker — software included
I run Berserker Oak — a premium solid-wood furniture studio in Mazovia. Real, for a change.
Best place: opalczynski.com for essays, LinkedIn for everything else.
If you're building something interesting — AI-native, greenfield, or just a real product with messy problems — I'd love to hear about it.