Who am I?

Born in the eighties, I dreamed of becoming an astronaut already in kindergarten. Born in the eighties in Eastern Europe, I quickly soaked up the ever present brutal realism, and pragmatically pivoted to a slightly more realistic, but only slightly less romantic interest in astronomy. This passion helped me survive through school and contributed to my decision to study the humanities. It made perfect sense at the time.

After years of working and volunteering in a number of Polish NGOs and a various selection of odd jobs, I moved to Berlin for a fresh start, and taught myself enough to get into software engineering. Currently in Oslo, I'm still an engineer. After years of living in comfort an engineering life provides, I'm focusing on fighting climate change. I'm a two-times immigrant, this is a process.

I have a technical blog, which I don't update as regularly as I'd like since my crime is being a hobby maximalist. I used to blog more in Polish: on politics, feminism and, together with fellow activists, on animal rights and guerrilla gardening (our blog, sadly, did not survive when the blogging platform was discontinued; own your data is the universal lesson).

I think people are what they do, not who they say they are. So here's a selection of things I did that I would want to humbly believe answer the titular question.

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As part of Suboktav, an electronic music collective, I entertained a small but lovely audience during outdoor raves in 2021 and 2022. If you enjoy any flavor of electronic music, you can follow Suboktav events on its Facebook group.

Logo of the Female Developer of the Year award by FINN.no with the year 2022, because there was no logo for the year 2021.

In 2021, I was nominated for the first Female Developer of the Year Award which celebrates Norwegian engineering women.

Title slide of my presentation, 'Making our applications greener'. The background of the slide is an analog photo I took when I was hiking in the Alps.

In 2019, I gave a talk during DevopsDay Oslo about making our applications greener. Preparing this talk helped me realize there's so much I could do, as an engineer, to influence the industry, and eventually gave me a renewed sense of purpose.

Two women squat over the abortion drone that just landed. They are handling the pills with their names that the drone delivered to them. I'm on the right.

Do you remember the Abortion Drone? I would argue it was one of the first reproductive rights actions tailored for the contemporary news media cycle. In 2015, Women on Waves flew a drone carrying abortion pills over the German/Polish border. A fantastic event. I was lucky enough to be there on the Polish side, receiving one package of the pills.

A photo of me on stage at RubyConf Argentina 2014. Behind me there's a screen with a slide that has a quote from Aristotle on it: 'The use of reason is more distinctive of a human being than the use of his limbs'. Image credit: Estela Garcia Fotografa Profesio

I crowdsourced a trip to RubyConf Argentina in 2014, where I gave a talk about the evolution of programming languages. The service I used for collecting money doesn't exist anymore, so here's a broken Wayback Machine version. I collected 1.760,00 €. I described Ruby's place in that evolution on Monterail's website.

A photo of me standing on stage at Rails Girls Warsaw, explaining how a Ruby on Rails app is like a bento box.

Once (in 2014), I learned Ruby on Rails so that I could teach other women how to make websites as a Rails Girls coach, once in Poznań, and once in Warsaw. I did something similar with Clojure in Berlin: first as a participant of Clojure Bridge, then as a coach.

A photo of me at the starting line of the Poznań 2013 marathon. I'm wearing a grey running shirt with a 'Warsaw Run 10km' logo.

In 2013, I ran a marathon in the Polish city of Poznań. I took a year to go from zero to marathon runner, and I blogged about some of theś preparations and the day. It's in Polish, casual, and you can read it here.

A screenshot of a Newsweek article in Polish. The title says 'Życie za darmo'. There's a somewhat funny photo of three people in jeans short holding up produce on a plate made of a trash can lid.

Before I uprooted myself and moved to Berlin, I was lucky enough to be part of a wonderful community of activists in Warsaw. We've done a variety of things, from a guerrilla gardening tour of Poland+ (holding a workshop at the notorious Czech Fluff Fest), to piqueting the worst Polish circus twice a day for two weeks straight for their documented animal abuse. We organized hundreds of events, literally, all over the country, and once got featured in Newsweek for our freeganism shenanigans.

Blue and white logo of the Tak dla Kobiet initiative.

In 2011, I joined the Tak dla Kobiet (Yes for Women) initiative, one of many uprisings to provide people in Poland access to safe and legal abortions. We spent three months collecting signatures over our legislation project all over the country, holding protests, and building networks. Tragically, we did not succeed in changing the law, just like multiple initiatives before us and after us. I still believe that time will come.

The only photo from X-Apartments that we have is a photo of part of our installation: a telescope pointing to

2010 was a good year: our guerrilla gardening collective called MPO (Miejska Partyzantka Ogrodnicza, a play on the name of Warsaw's city cleaning company) ran a number of workshops to inspire locals to take over unused lots and greenify their surroundings. One such workshop, which included making seed bombs out of soil, happened as part of the X-Apartments theater festival in a top-level suite at a Marriott hotel. We had a telescope pointing to an unused green lot around the Warsaw Ghetto. The contrast of a rich interior with soil and that unused lot of land was striking.

A photo of me sitting on a chair, proudly holding an early issue of the Vege magazine, with my dad standing next to me.

In May 2010, my partner at the time and I won 3rd place in the Polish National Veggie Burger Eating Contest. Our team was called "Ave Seitan". 2010 was also the year the first Polish vegetarian lifestyle magazine came to life. It's called Vege, and I was lucky enough to be an editor for the first ten months. Sharing happy feels with my dad on that photo.