About this blog and the author

This is meant to be a lifestyle blog.
I write about personal growth, adventures, philosophy, and technology.

What is the value of this blog to you?

When you open this blog, you will want to find value. I am aware of it.

Please allow me to expand on it. I hope you find it interesting.

When I was growing up, I did not have a mentor.

My smart and beautiful mother died after years of complications when I was 12 years old.

My father and the rest of the family moved to the USA. I was left behind in gloomy, drunk, socialist Poland.

First, I lived with an aunt and later with a neighbor.

Life back then, I can describe as a semi-feral state of skipping classes, dating, and drinking too much straight vodka for an adult, not to mention for a teen. My friends were my family.

Eventually, 7 years later, I got a green card visa to the USA right before I turned 18.

In the USA, we lived in Chicago. The Carl Schulz H.S. was a ghetto with gangs fighting by hundreds. During my tenure there, three (3) people got shot to death; their faces are still in my memory.

It was not all bad; I became a good student, and it was not hard in an inner-city public school. I participated in an Academic Decathlon and even won a medal.

I had a couple of good teachers to whom I am thankful. However, I still needed mentors.

In Chicago, where we lived, I was surrounded by people who cleaned or worked in construction. My father worked as a janitor till his retirement. I also cleaned the AMOCO engineering building at night on weekends, returning at 3 AM.

Somehow, I did not see the light at the end of the tunnel.

When a U.S. Marines recruiter called me, I said "yes" on the spot.
Soon after, I was shipped to San Diego for the boot camp. I still barely spoke English.

I excelled in the Marines. Back in Poland, I was a competitive runner; my name might still be featured on the school gym leaderboard. At the same time, I practiced Shotokan Karate with the 4th Dan Sensei Rączka (his name means "hand" or TE in Japanese). The Sensei, if he was training kids in the USA, would surely be locked in prison. We feared and loved him, and it made the Marine boot camp look easy.

I went to engineering school in North Carolina, where we learned how to troubleshoot and fix electronics, mostly voltage regulators on high-power diesel generators.

The Marine Corps sent me to Okinawa, Japan, and I loved every minute of it.

Upon reporting to my unit in Okinawa, my platoon sergeant asked me, "Are you dive-certified? You will be!" He was a PADI instructor, and we dove the most beautiful coral reefs every weekend. We had a tradition of SCUBA diving to (better not to mention) decompression depth at night for New Year's. We even had a Champagne opened down deep.

I stayed in Okinawa for three years.

Also, in Okinawa, I studied Cultural Anthropology of East Asia at night at the University of Maryland, Asian Division.

I met my first mentor, an anthropologist named Dr. Janice Turner, there. I will describe this at length in another article. For the first time, I wanted to be a scientist and a researcher.

I went through a difficult financial time once I left the Marines, which is a separate article.

One night, I was sitting on the midnight shift in a highrise building in Chicago, working as a lobby doorman. I always had a pile of books and a laptop. A young Russian guy, definitively after many drinks, looked at my books and, after a short conversation, asked me to come to their company for an interview.

The company was RollingStone.com. Yes, the most popular music magazine in history.

In the interview, I told the panel that I did not have a degree (I was a current student of Computer Science) and had never worked as a programmer.

My future boss asked about my Websites. It was around 1999, the year of the Internet Boom. I had about a dozen sites. He quickly checked that they were registered in my name, and I got an offer on the spot.

I will not bore you with an even longer story. Still, three short years later, I was a director of technology in a startup we took from me, with two VPs and an assistant working literally in a boiler room to a profitable 125-person business.

I had to unlearn all the bad habits. In fact, the habits and the best practices are the underlying theme of this blog.

I went through many companies, both very big and small.

I have organized over 100 technical conferences and spoken at as many.

I have advised and consulted many startups.

I had my own successful company and taught Computer Science at a local college.

So here I am now.

In this blog, I want to mentor, share, and save people decades of struggle that could have been prevented if I had mentors.

However, more than career growth is needed; you must have balance.

Who is the author of this blog?

I am a person with many eclectic interests and experiences.

The following quote fits me well.

“A man should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”

by Robert A. Heinlein,

I hope it will fit you, too, my readers.

I was born in a small town in the Polish mountains
and now live in the Cascade Mountains,
so I consider myself a highlander.

I have a hat to prove it, too.