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.