Słomkowski's technical musings

Playing with software, hardware and touching the sky with a paraglider.

About this site and its author

About the author

Michał Słomkowski–software developer, tinkerer and hardware enthusiast. I work full-time as a Java/Kotlin backend developer and Linux system administrator. Based in Poznań, Poland. If you are in the area and want to meet or talk, let me know!

Contact information

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions or ideas. You can easily decode my e-mail: michal [‘at’ character] domain this site is hosted on.

You can also try to reach my Meshtastic node in Poznań.

Technology, hacking and tinkering

Career-wise, I’m a backend developer with a background in JVM technologies, Kotlin, Spring, Hibernate, PostgreSQL, and so on.

As a hobby, my areas of interest shift over time but generally revolve around the following themes (not in any particular order): Linux, hardware, electronics, AVR, post-apocalyptic topics, welding, mechanics, homelab, embedded systems, high voltage, robots, C++, Kotlin, upcycling, classic Mercedes-Benz cars, old-school displays, Meshtastic, retrocomputing, reverse engineering, bare-metal programming, self-hosting. Recently, I have also become interested in home improvement and Home Assistant.

Paragliding

Since 2014 I’ve paragliding, especially paramotoring. I also tried some thermal flying with not-so-spectacular results.

List of my equipment:

Bikes and unicycles

There were periods in my life when I used bikes extensively, primarily for commuting. I also have a mild interest in bicycle trekking. In 2022, I learned to ride a unicycle. Occasionally, I take relatively short rides of several kilometers on my modified 29-inch unicycle.

Website

During my teen years, I maintained websites under various now-defunct addresses: flylab.ovh.org, flylab.glt.pl, flylab.cba.pl, slomkowski.glt.pl. The current iteration, hosted under this domain, began in 2018 and is intended to stay. I don’t write often, the expected publication frequency is 3–4 articles per year.

In the winter of 2024, feeling a bit nostalgic, I went through my backups and found the archives of my previous websites. I translated and migrated content that was still relevant. The projects and articles were created mainly during my gimnazjum years. I republished them here primarily for sentimental reasons, keeping the original publication dates.

Technologies

This site is built with a heavily modified version of the static site generator Ark, written in Python. Theme created from scratch. The site is free of cookies, analytics, tracking, and third-party resources. JavaScript is used only for the image gallery (BaguetteBox).

Generative AI statement

I utilize LLMs to perform spelling and grammar correction. I also ask them to point out the weak parts of the text. I don’t use them for any creative purposes here.

No generative AI and no image enhancement tools were used to generate any image. Every photo is real except some illustrative photos of commercial products taken from the Internet.