Getting to Know the Keep Team: Kuba

We are excited to continue the Getting to Know the Keep Team series with a member of the development team. Meet Jakub “Kuba” Nowakowski!

Jack: Hi Kuba! Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background?

Kuba: Hey Jack! Sure, I’d love to! Where should I start… I grew up in a beautiful and old city of Przemyśl near the south-eastern Polish border. I’ve been interested in computers since I first used my cousins PC and I became more interested when I got my first computer for Christmas when I was 8. As a kid, I used PC mostly to play games. As a teenager, I found ways to profit from my interests by building websites for friends, helping people with their computer issues and setting up and administering a LAN across the neighborhood.

After graduating high school I moved to Kraków where I studied finance and accounting. I decided to do that because I thought, “What better place to earn money than the industry which holds the money?”

I was still spending a lot of my spare time outside of studying on computers, learning on my own. During my second year of studies, I started an internship in a bank as a manual tester, which was a great introduction to change my hobby into a profession. Three months later I had my first full-time job which I did on top of all my studying. At this stage of my career, I had a great opportunity to coordinate testing activities for an innovative 100% online bank startup. This included test team management as well as cooperation with vendors and development teams on software delivery. That was where I cognized the whole software development lifecycle.

After a successful go-live, I decided to move into more technical stuff — particularly automation and software engineering roles. I worked on many financial and telecommunication projects over the years for the world biggest players, the names and details of which I, unfortunately, cannot mention. It was a huge transition from a tester to a software engineering consultant. It was a great time with a lot of learning and I got a load of experience. I met a lot of people who supported me and I was constantly learning something new.

So that is most of my professional life. Besides technology what I’m interested the most is experiencing new things. I always wanted to ride a motorcycle, so I got a driving license and have a Ducati Monster 620 brought straight from Italy. It’s a beautiful motorcycle and the whirr of the engine gives me goosebumps. Besides that, I enjoy food and traveling, best if it’s done together. Usually once I buy the plane tickets for one trip, I am on to planning the next one after that!

This year I visited the Far East for the first time and traveled around the Malay Peninsula. It was a delightful experience and a great introduction to Asian culture. While there, I had the chance to experience a wide range of cultures and lifestyles. The place that surprised me the most was Singapore because it was not a big concrete city like most metropolises in the world. What astonished me was how green it was! There were gardens hanging out of the building’s terraces and the main arteries of the city were filled with flora. When I travel, I always try a local cuisine of the country I am visiting. The most extreme meal I have ever had, however, was here in Poland and that was a bull’s testicle. Of course, it was cooked and prepared in a very delicious way!

J: How long have you been working in the blockchain space and how were you introduced to it?

K: To be honest, Keep is my first professional experience with blockchain. I’ve been interested in this emerging technology for some time. I was trying to find a project using it where I could help, but unfortunately it was new technology and not much was happening around blockchain in Poland. I can see emerging interest in blockchain here in Poland now and I definitely will be giving it a close look.

J: How did you find Keep?

K: Keep found me! Our teammate Piotr Dyraga — whom I had worked with a couple years back — came to me with a bottle of Scotch and an offer that I couldn’t refuse. He told me that Keep is the best project because we will have the possibility to work together with a great team on the blockchain revolution. I knew then that this was an opportunity to build something awesome. So the next day I decided to change my life and work with you guys.

J: What technologies and concepts have you had to learn/catch up on as you’ve started doing development on Keep?

K: There have been a couple of things. The first was Go programming language, which came surprisingly easy to me. Coding in Go is very enjoyable, and therefore, it lacks an entry barrier for people wanting to learn it.

What didn’t come so easily and was challenging was digging into concepts of cryptography and theoretical mathematics. I hadn’t done any significant math since university, not to mention the using the concepts of the theoretical math used in cryptographic protocols. I love broadening my horizons so that all was a pleasure.

J: What use cases for Keep do you find most exciting?

K: I like that you will really own your data and it will be you who decides to give someone access to your specific information.

But what excites me the most is that Keep will become a core technology over which innovative solutions will be built. Those use cases that we don’t know yet are the most interesting for me. I’m excited to see how people will use Keep to build their solutions. Some great thing will be created which could change some parts of our lives.

J: What is different about working on Keep vs previous products you’ve worked on?

K: The technologies we’re using might be the biggest difference. We’re free to discover and use any cutting edge technology which will meet our needs. In previous projects, we were limited to well established stable solutions due to the types of products we had to work on (banking and telecommunication systems). The flexibility here gives us an awesome opportunity to expand our knowledge.

J: What tools do you like to use when working and coding?

K: The most useful tools for me are a pen and a sheet of paper. I like to plan and visualize what needs to be done. It’s very useful when working on complex algorithms.

To really focus while working I need to cut off from everything that distracts me, especially when working out of my home office. To do that I use headphones with ANC and Spotify playing some mellow beats or sounds of nature.

In coding, I used to work a lot with IDEA IntelliJ for Java development, that’s a perfectly tailored IDE. When I started to develop in Go I switched to Visual Studio Code and I’m really surprised how powerful this open source tool is, mostly because of the extensions developed by the community.

J: What’s it been like to work remotely full-time from Poland?

K: It was a huge change for me to work 100% remotely. I was little concerned about how I would manage spending 12 hours a day alone in a dark basement…But it turned out that’s nothing like that! I’ve set up a very comfortable home office, where I love to work. I also have the flexibility to work from any place where I can connect to the internet. There are lots of coworking spaces we can use. I’m planning to escape from freezy winter and spend some time coding from the Canary Islands. I love that I’ve got the freedom to flexibly manage my time and surroundings.

Another advantage is saving a significant amount of time on the commute, which is time that I can now spend on more useful activities.

Remote working requires some discipline and good organization. I have learned (and continue to learn) a lot about remote work culture from my teammates.

J: You have a nickname here at Keep, The Boar. How did you get this nickname and what is the meaning?

K: Hahaha, great question, Jack! Exactly, why do you keep calling me The Boar? (laughing) Boar in common Polish can be translated to a person who is fearless or achieved something significant and has earned your respect. Something like a badass…is that the right word? I remember that Piotr called me that once and that escalated quickly.

J: You have a history with some of the development team, where did you guys meet?

K: Yes! I already mentioned Piotr, who gave me the nickname “The Boar”. We worked together a couple of years ago on trans European settlements system. Piotr was an experienced software engineer who shared a lot of valuable knowledge with me. We worked together for a year. He was one of my mentors and a person who helped me shape my career. Personally, Piotr is a great dude, we always had a common view of the world which surrounds us.

J: Do you have any funny or interesting stories about working with the Keep team?

K: Please don’t tell anybody but I think Antonio has some superpowers. I’m always impressed by how he catches up with everything that’s going on in the project and can provide an answer to any question in 15 seconds. I suspect this is something like he’s cloning himself or can freeze the time flow… I’m not sure yet, but I’ll be sniffing around.

J: Anything else you’d like to add?

K: I’d like to encourage people, mostly those working at a desk, to remember about exercising. I personally neglected that for some time and experienced spine discomfort due to working in a sitting position for a long time. Last year I decided to change something so I started swimming. It’s been around 14 months now and I’m addicted to the smell of chlorine! The time I mentioned I saved thanks to remote work I devoted to the gym and swimming pool. It’s good not only for physical health but for mental balance as well.

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