Meet the team: Wojciech Pituła

Q&A with one of our Staff Scala Engineers

Why did you decide to join SwissBorg?

To be honest, there isn’t much of a story behind it and a lot of luck instead. My previous ship was sinking and I was looking for a new gig. I learned from a friend that SwissBorg is hiring. At the same time, I exchanged a few tweets with Nico, my-soon-to-become CTO. This was the first good sign. Then the interview process was really nice. And here I am, 3 years later with SwissBorg taking first place among all my workplaces. Turns out it was a really good bet.

What is the most interesting project that you have worked on so far?

Integrating payment providers is a very interesting area. Each provider is unique and comes with different challenges. The financial domain is also interesting due to its high-risk nature. Small mistakes can lead to big losses, so you need to design the systems with that in mind.

Why is Scala your language of choice? Are there any advantages of this language?

For me, Scala is the language with the least resistance. I can express exactly what I need in a very precise way. It’s also the language that has the lowest number of “bothersome parts” — things that I could complain about. It might be a bit harder than alternatives, but it gives you the power to do what you’re asked to do without imposing any unnecessary pains or additional work.

At the same time, I believe that every language comes with a different mindset and attracts different developers. I enjoy working with Scala developers a lot and like how they think.

Why is it important for you to be so involved in the Scala community?

I like meeting new people and talking with them, even though I always considered myself an introvert, and it still costs me quite a lot of energy. Any such conversation teaches me something new, such as how people see Scala, how they use it, and what problems they solve. This, in turn, allows me to form my own beliefs.

At the same time, I really like Scala as a language and wish for it to succeed. So I do my best to help it. I was never the best coder in the room and never really succeeded in OSS, so now I try to stick to posting bad takes on Twitter and occasionally doing conference talks. It turns out this can be quite influential.

Oh, and don’t think I’m this altruistic. I made a good amount of money by bringing people from my network to SwissBorg!

What technical topic excites you the most right now?

I don’t know if “excitement” is the right word, but recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about workflows (business processes, microservice orchestration, there are a lot of different names). It’s a problem that shows up in almost every company, and yet we don’t have good tools to abstract the complexity away. I worked in the past with Camunda and Temporal, and I’ve been building an in-house solution for some time. Now I’m looking into Conductor. It turns out all of them have significant flaws, and I have a feeling we can do better.

What advice would you give to your younger self?

Do everything exactly as you do, and it will be fine. Okay, that might not be the most useful advice, but I’m really satisfied with my life.

What is one interesting and random fact about yourself?

Last year, I listened to 92 audiobooks, totalling 50 days of constant listening (at a standard pace, I listen a bit faster). This year, I’m on a good path to exceed 100.