About

Arek Panek smiling in front of a pink mural with a large orange-and-yellow flower painted above him, taken in Oaxaca.

I’m Arek Panek, a senior software engineer at Buffer, where I’ve been on the engineering team for five years. Before Buffer I spent three years on the DataOps team at Facebook, working on the internal infrastructure that supported Facebook’s analytics and experimentation platforms.

I’ve been writing software for around nineteen years — I started as an eleven-year-old who liked making things move on a screen, and the last ten of those years have been commercial. It still feels like the same hobby, just with deadlines and a tax on it now.

At Buffer I work across the backend — integrations with new social channels, channel features, authentication and authorization, our public API, and whatever else needs careful work that touches the system end-to-end. Alongside the building, I spend a meaningful slice of my week mentoring junior engineers and leading projects.

My taste runs toward distributed systems and boring tech — well-understood, well-documented tools that keep working without surprises, and the discipline of choosing the right one for the job rather than the most exciting one. I’m a generalist more by circumstance than design: every job I’ve taken has shipped on a different stack, well before the AI era made that the norm for everyone. These days I’m mostly writing Node.js and Go.

I write here mostly to think out loud. Some posts are technical walkthroughs; others are personal essays about how I work and the trade-offs that shaped my path. Older posts (originally published at apollin.com) are preserved here for the historical record.

Outside of code: history books, scuba diving, tennis, spikeball, and a fair amount of content creation. I’m an enthusiast of teas (oolong, mostly) and of watches.

The best way to reach me is by commenting on my LinkedIn posts — that’s where I actually engage. You can also find me on GitHub.

Now

A now page — a snapshot of what I'm actually focused on at the moment, hand-edited (not auto-generated). See what I've been posting on socials.

Work

Five years at Buffer as a senior software engineer. Currently across the backend — integrations, public API, auth, and mentoring junior engineers. Mostly Node.js and Go these days.

Side

Building a personal financial-transparency app — putting my own numbers somewhere structured rather than spreadsheets. Learning more Go in the process.

Where

Back in Poland, at least through October.

Reading

  • Immune by Philipp Dettmer
  • Talibowie

Off-screen

History books, scuba diving, tennis, spikeball. Tea (mostly oolong). Watches.

Now last updated: 13 May 2026

Uses

Inspired by usesthis.com: what I actually reach for. Updated when something changes — not aspirational.

Hardware — travel kit

What lives in the bag when I'm not at home.

  • Laptop: MacBook Pro M3 Max, 128 GB RAM
  • Keyboard: Apple Magic Keyboard
  • Mouse: Apple Magic Mouse
  • Headphones: AirPods Pro (2nd gen)
  • Phone: Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra, 1 TB

Hardware — home office

  • External monitor: Apple Studio Display
  • Webcam: Elgato
  • Microphone: Elgato Wave:3
  • Monitor light: BenQ ScreenBar
  • Extra light: Elgato

Photo & video

  • Camera: Sony α7 IV, with 24–70mm f/2.8 GM II zoom + 35mm f/1.8 prime
  • Audio: Røde Wireless Pro
  • Tripod: Peak Design Aluminium Travel Tripod
  • Bag: Peak Design Field Pouch / messenger (3L)
  • Drone: DJI Mavic Air 2
  • Smart glasses: Ray-Ban Meta — surprisingly nice for listening to podcasts on walks
  • Video edit: CapCut
  • Photo edit: Adobe Lightroom & Photoshop

Editor + terminal

  • Editor: PhpStorm + VS Code, depending on the project
  • Terminal: iTerm2
  • Shell: zsh + oh-my-zsh

AI assistance

  • Claude + Claude Code — primary, mostly for coding.
    • superpowers skills — great for planning
    • NanoClawd — still setting it up
  • ChatGPT and Gemini — daily questions, side-by-side
  • Perplexity — deep research

Daily-driver apps

  • Browser: Chrome
  • Password manager: 1Password
  • Notes: Obsidian (mid-migration from Notion)
  • Tasks: Todoist
  • Calendar: Google Calendar
  • Email: Gmail

Software engineering

  • Primary languages: Node.js (TypeScript) and Go
  • API client: Insomnia
  • VPN: NordVPN

Services I pay for

  • VPS hosting: Hetzner Cloud CX22 (2 vCPU / 4 GB RAM / 40 GB SSD, €4.51/mo). Migrated from DigitalOcean for the EU region and price.
  • Static site hosting: Cloudflare Pages (free)
  • DNS / CDN / DDoS: Cloudflare
  • Domains: OVH
  • Source / images / CI: GitHub
  • Time tracking: Rize
  • Banking: Revolut Metal
  • Cloud storage: Google One (5 TB — photos and video chew through it)
  • Spotify Premium
  • YouTube Premium
  • ElevenLabs (included in Lenny's Product Pass)
  • Canva (Product Pass)
  • Wispr Flow (won 3 years in a contest; 1 year available in Product Pass)

Newsletters I read

Fitness

  • Watch: Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 — running and swimming only
  • Recovery: Whoop
  • At home: Merach walking pad
  • Workouts: Freeletics (included in Revolut Metal)
  • Swim audio: Shokz OpenSwim Pro

Diving

  • Mask: Tecline Frameless
  • Cylinder: Tecline stage
  • Fins: Tecline Military Jetfins
  • Drysuit: Santi
  • BCD / wing: Tecline (single + double)
  • Emergency comms: Garmin inReach + satellite subscription
  • Insurance: DAN
  • Torch: Tecline hand torch

Finance

  • Day-to-day banking: Revolut (personal + business)
  • Budgeting: YNAB
  • Stocks: Interactive Brokers
  • European pension (OIPE): Finax

Travel essentials

  • Shoes: always one pair of trail runners — usually Nike Pegasus Trail
  • Layers: merino tees + ponte jacket from Wool&Prince
  • Underwear / socks: merino
  • Puff jacket: a cheap 4F one — surprisingly fine
  • Main bag: Patagonia Black Hole 40L as the carry-on (only bag for months at a time)
  • Personal item: Jack Wolfskin 10L backpack
  • Day trips: Uniqlo round mini shoulder bag

Uses last updated: 13 May 2026