Finding a calling is not a piece of cake for everyone. But apparently, it wasn’t for Wojtek Rząsa who has started his journey with technology after his studies, at the university as a lecturer. Now he’s a part of FLYR’s team where he can deeply focus on solving technical problems and that’s why he never gets bored.
So tell us. How did you end up so deeply drowned in technologies?
It was always clear to me what I wanted to do. Some people struggle to find their call, while I was lucky enough to have this clarity. You know, when I fell out of the cradle, I already counted on my fingers, but unlike the others I was counting in binary 🙂
After graduation I was looking for a challenging and interesting job and started an academic career. I was conducting research, publishing, and lecturing in computer science for 15 years. But, aside from science and teaching I have always felt attracted to and so I have always been doing strictly practical things that simply worked.
Gradually, I realized I needed a different kind of challenge than what the university could offer. The dynamism of the FLYR company emerged as a very interesting opportunity. Old habits die hard, I’m not lecturing anymore, but still like to share my knowledge and while working with FLYR I had an opportunity to attend some events and conferences as a speaker:
Segfault 2018 Wrocław, ADB Tech Talk 2018 Zielona Góra, Core Dump 2018 Kraków, SegFault 2019 Kraków, EuroPython 2019 Bazylea, Kariera IT 2020 Rzeszów; It Depends 2021.
“Agile is the way to go, but there’s also an opportunity to stress-test it – how well does it really work?”
What challenges do you face in your daily work?
There’s a large amount of data to process and short time constraints of web application. The application developed by our team is changing significantly over time. We need to ensure we can deliver new features on time, but leave the codebase in a good shape, so that we can keep a steady pace of development in the future.
Agile is the way to go, but there’s also an opportunity to stress-test it – how well does it really work? How good are we at applying it on a daily basis and what can we improve? What we do is unique on the market, and so we need to struggle with technical challenges – very requently we can’t simply take a standard, well-known solution, and even if we can, we need to adjust it to our specific needs.
What do you value most in your current position?
Solving technical problems – for me, that’s probably the most interesting part. And not just for fun – these are very practical problems that need to be solved to make the product work.
What have you cracked recently?
What we do in FLYR is helping airlines to price their tickets. To do it for travels where more than one flight is involved, we had to identify possible connections in the whole network of flights for the entire year.
Even if we take into account connections with up to 3 stopovers, there are still too many possibilities to consider. My task was to find a way to generate interesting itineraries that should be priced every day. The goal was to find an efficient and flexible solution since we still weren’t sure how to define the “interesting” itinerary.
It’s just an example of a challenging task with an opportunity to play with a new tool – a graph database – and check how well it would work for us. It’s also a good topic for another conference talk, which I hope to prepare soon 😉
“We have a well-defined product vision, so we don’t run in circles to find out what we should deliver”.
Why does it pay to join FLYR?
I’ve been working for FLYR for almost three years and never got bored. There are still new problems to solve, new opportunities to develop, and new experiences to gain. And we have a well-defined product vision, so we don’t run in circles to find out what we should deliver. We know that what we do is satisfying our clients’ expectations.
