Jarosław Pałka

With over 20 years in the IT industry, he has worked as a database administrator, developer, architect, manager, and a self-described “disaster recovery engineer.” He has taken part in small, medium, and absurdly large projects—run according to waterfall, Agile, or with no methodology at all—with invariably the same outcome. This led him to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you do it well, in the simplest possible way, and use the right tools to do the work for you. Along the way, he was captivated by the ideas of TDD and Software Craftsmanship, pushed beautifully simple concepts like REST and NoSQL to their limits, only to later abandon them in favor of exploring systems thinking, becoming fascinated by the power of metaphor and discovering that we are governed by the same “laws of nature.” A rebellious follower of the JVM church, a researcher of bytecode and JIT, and an enthusiast of all kinds of parsers, interpreters, and compilers. On a daily basis, he fights for better performance at Neo4j. From time to time, his low-quality jokes about architecture can be heard at conferences across Poland. In his spare time, he works as a trainer at http://symentis.pl, writes a blog at http://geekyprimitives.wordpress.com/, and acts as a self-appointed dictator on the program committees of conferences such as CoreDump, SegFault, JDD, and 4Developers.