User Guide

Availability

Availability: 0700-1600 UTC

Channels:

• Email: [email protected]
• LinkedIn: bartoszkustra
• Github: bartekkustra
• X: @nosekbk
• YouTube: @nosekbk

Personality

• I’m very straightforward which can be a blessing and a curse. If I made you feel bad I didn’t mean it, so please call me out on that.
• I like dark humour. The closer relationship we have, the darker the humour is.
• Introvert who learned how to be an extrovert but with a small social battery that needs to be recharged.
• A lot of the times I talk more than I was asked to, and tend to over-explain. Stop me at any time.
• I believe there are no strangers, just friends I haven’t met yet. I usually trust people on the spot, and let them slowly lose that trust with their actions.
• I am never offended by anything.
• Whatever I do, I am doing to help others. If you feel like I’m doing something behind someone’s back, please reach out. I’ll be very transparent about why and how I’m doing it.

What I value

Given word. If you promise something - deliver it. Whether it’s a scheduled meeting, or anything else. If something cannot be done or delivered on a promised time, just let me know - be honest. I cannot stand when people break their given words and not say what happened and why. I don’t care if you reach out to me 1 minute before the deadline or 1 day later - if you do that I am grateful for honesty.

Honesty and transparency. If you have something to say - say it. You can’t offend me by your words or actions because I know my worth. If you feel like I messed up - tell me that directly. Be straightforward about the problem, and don’t sugarcoat the message.

Priorities

• Family. My daughter, my son, and my wife. My friends.
• Myself. My wellbeing. My successes and failures. My improvements and shortcomings.
• Work. Only if the above are taken care of I can do my best at work.

Other info

A few years ago I stumbled across Yes Theory and realised how often I was saying “no” to things that used to define me — travel, curiosity, people. I’ve been course-correcting ever since.

Back in 2006 I had an accident that banned me from most of the sports I loved — downhill biking, MTB street, rollerblades in the skate park, aikido (3rd Kyu), swimming, snowboarding. It also left me genuinely afraid of water: I was training for a lifeguard licence, and years later it took me six months of pool visits just to be ready for a company retreat in Mexico. Lakes and oceans are still a work in progress. That event parked me behind a desk — and, honestly, made settling into being a husband and father easier.

The bike, though — the bike came back. Around 2020 I got on one again, went full Enduro MTB, and raced a couple of times in the Polish mountains. I kept at it until 2023, when breaking both hands at once finally convinced me to slow down. Some lessons apparently need to be delivered twice. There’s video evidence on YouTube, sitting right next to my conference talks — a channel with range, if nothing else.

The desk turned out to be less of a dead end than I feared, because the “yes” energy had to go somewhere: I build things. An app that tracks my kids’ fevers, born of 2am dose math in the Notes app. An English tutor for my daughter that runs entirely on an iPad, no cloud. A puzzle game polished down to the shaders and the synthesized chimes. Physics simulations that run overnight on my own machines, because nobody else was going to run them. Saying “yes” doesn’t always require an airport.

The dream of visiting every country in the world is still there. The counter moves slowly — two kids will do that — and I’ve made peace with the math. If I don’t finish the list myself, I’ll make sure my kids grow up believing the list is possible.

What I am currently working on

• Shipping my own apps. After years of testing other people’s software I started building my own — a child fever tracker, a puzzle game polished to a degree nobody asked for, an idle cookie-clickeresque garden game. Most are somewhere between TestFlight and App Store paperwork. The projects page keeps the honest status of each.
• Agentic engineering. I orchestrate AI agents to build, test, and review software — and I bring a QA Lead’s scepticism to it: agents lie about being done, so the interesting problem is designing verification they can’t talk their way past. This changed how I work more than anything since automation did.
• This website. A digital garden that replaced a one-page business card. Everything on it — projects, experiments, writing — is pushed straight from git, and adding to it is deliberately frictionless so it actually grows.
• Saying “yes” with a helmet on. Slower on the bike since 2023, but the curiosity stays: side research, new tools, teaching my kids that the world is bigger than our village.
• Myself. Still never done improving — health, patience, positivity, and protecting my time so the three priorities above the fold stay in the right order.