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.

Currently: back in Poland after three months in Thailand, Taiwan, and Japan; learning Go; building a personal financial-transparency app on the side.

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.