michal.piekarczyk.xyz

Longer-form posts about whatever I'm exploring.

• Looking Forwards Feb 7, 2026

  Email forwarding mystery solved Feeling several facepalms now that my michal@piekarczyk.xyz email finally forwards to my hey.com email inbox. After several sessions of tweaking, the answer was low tech! Registrar forwarding Originally, I setup mail forwarding on my domain registrar. Only $5 a year, okay why not. After proving to my registrar I owned my hey email, I was all set, but tests yielded silence. I spent several chat sessions with a support engineer at my registrar.

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  Gardening time Dec 28, 2025

  Life’s a garden, can you dig it? That is what a colleague of mine had said very often when we worked together, about how you need to put time and effort into stuff. You know, get your hands dirty ! Picking up my shovel Today I finally took a first step to trying out this digital gardening concept on Maggie Appleton’s blog0. I came across back on haha I don’t know why but on 2025-07-04 , I guess it was a kind of independence day in my brain, from the march of chronology.

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  Skip the Jetlag Dec 11, 2025

  Came back from a flight from New Delhi , Monday morning, that left New Delhi just after midnight and 16 hours later arriving in New York around 5:30 am. And so far today, Thursday morning, I feel kind of fine, not really jet lagged, in the sense of wanting to wake or sleep at odd hours. The specific strategy I did in attempting to align meal time and sleep time with the destination time zone was to fast the day of the flight until lunch time arrival at my destination.

• Something is not Tracking Dec 10, 2025

  Recently I went on a trip to India where so much was going on I stopped using my meal tracking. And on this trip the other thing that happened was that half the time, I was in a plane, waiting for a plane, or on a bus –or on the back of a Maruti Suzuki offroad Jimny– or otherwise sedentary. And yet, after the brief 10 day trip, I carved off an inch and a half off my waist and dropped over 6 pounds on the scale.

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  Safety first Nov 8, 2025

  I was recently reading this Forbes article1 on a colleague’s recommendation, asking the question, “Why So Many Leaders Say They Want Innovation But Reward Compliance”. The author’s answer is essentially that it is easy to talk about innovation, but because it is less predictable, then safe bets are rewarded by default and a vicious cycle ensues. Innovation is an optical illusion and idea seeds do not get planted. I think there is another answer worth exploring.

Fleeting notes and thoughts that might take shape later.

• Whose Responsibility is Tech Debt Feb 11, 2026

  Starting a small note here, around discussions myself and others have been having on my team about whether addressing tech debt should be prioritized explicitly or is it something you just address like you might with local refactors with the so-called boy-scout-rule [1]. Realizing after having several converstions about this lately that there are many diverging opinions on this. I have some teammates who see this as the responsibility of the product team, and others who will tackle it head on like an obstacle in their way of the main task at hand.

• The Good the bad and the ugly of AI benefit shortfalls Feb 8, 2026

  I’m reading AI Snake Oil, and the authors intro by saying they will focus on the examples of AI that harm and they will not include the ones that benefit society. But it is not straightforward to create a list of the good examples. I think one of their examples in the good column was autocorrect. But auto orrect is a good example of where you can’t just sprinkle AI on a problem to solve it.

• Notes on feast for spark Feb 8, 2026

  Looking into feast, the open source feature store, and whether there is support for using feast as an interface around parquet and or delta tables, with use in a pyspark batch inference databricks environment. I see that parquet is mentioned in the quickstart2, using parquet as the offline component and using sqlite as the online store component. The offline store component is described as intended for training. Maybe it can be useful for a batch inference case too?

• More Is Less Feb 6, 2026

  Listening Nate B Jones here1 to the end. Thought I heard him refer to productivity gains. Had to rewind that to hear it again. every single agent you can run in parallel, multiplies your productivity. But does that translate to value? Recently, I’ve been reading the Healthcare Handbook2, where I (re)learned that “productivity” has a specific meaning to labor economists. Productivity is your output given your input. HH authors further cite this piece4.

• Iteration Planning Feb 1, 2026

  Notes, reading this article. Has some zingers in here , hah! The iron cross, maybe without one leg? You can’t cheat the scope–time–quality triangle. If we try to fix time and scope, quality takes the hit. In a developer-facing product, degraded quality means support escalations, technical debt, and broken trust. Like any debt, technical debt must be paid back, and its interest compounds over time. I have heard many variations of this.