The people who use our boards.

Who are you, and what do you do? What do you like to do outside of work?

Hi! My name is Jakub Pieszczek, and I’m a data scientist working at QED.ai on automatic digitization of health data using scannable forms. I’ve (almost) done my masters in CS at the University of Warsaw—five years after completing all courses I’m currently in the process of actually finishing my thesis, hoping to get it done by summer 2026.

Outside of CS I’m heavily into experimental music, drifting between ambient and noise. My first contact with music was pretty early on—I started playing the piano at seven, went to actual music school at sixteen but got kicked out two years later. Around middle school I stumbled upon FL Studio. Fascinated by the sounds of Skrillex or Flux Pavilion, I started exploring the world of making electronic music on the demo version of FL, meaning I couldn’t open saved projects—I had only one shot at finishing each one. Hibernating the PC made it possible to work on some projects for a longer period of time, but many were lost to unexpected Windows updates, crashes, or accidental power disconnection.

Throughout the years, probably due to my parallel interest in classical music, I started moving from EDM to different styles of electronic music—more contemplative, delicate, or nuanced sounds. This eventually brought me to the realm of ambient music, later moving towards more and more experimental features. I’d say stereotypical ambient, however, is too delicate for me—I usually look for intense emotions in the music I listen to or make. This is why I’ve gravitated towards noise or ambient/experimental forms which heavily draw from noise. I do still listen to other things though, like Carly Rae Jepsen from time to time (:

Unfortunately I haven’t managed to release anything yet, but I do have a live setup I’ve created using ppooll for Max and some hardware instruments/effects which I use to occasionally play live drone/noise shows with my friend as napieprzanko. In the past I’ve taken part in organizing some ambient events around Warsaw, also playing DJ sets from time to time. Since last year we’ve been doing our own event series called hałasowanko, showcasing local Polish DIY experimental acts, hoping to develop the scene further.

What hardware do you use?

For hardware I like to go light and mobile, since I often work outside of home, either in the office or in cafes around Warsaw. My laptop is a nine-year-old Dell XPS 13, somehow still working great after all these years (bought already refurbished!).

At home I also use a QHD LG monitor and an Apple Magic Trackpad to go with the Voyager. I feel like I’m the minority here, but I highly prefer touchpads to mouses—I’ve set up some additional gestures which help with navigation a lot (my favorite one being a three-finger swipe down to close the current tab).

For audio I have a Scarlett 2i2 from Focusrite and a pair of the classic Sennheiser HD600 headphones for that flat frequency response. The piano on the right is the Roland FP-30, which I highly recommend if someone’s going for a realistic piano feel with weighted keys on a budget—I’d say it’s the cheapest reasonable option, or at least was when I was doing my research like seven years ago, and I’m very satisfied with the purchase <:

And what software?

I’m a big fan of minimal setups, both physically and digitally. For my OS I use Arch Linux (btw) with i3 and minimal graphical tooling, which means no graphical file browser, no Wi-Fi GUI, etc. The terminal emulator is Terminator with custom CSS to fit my theme, and the shell is Zsh. I’m really big on note-taking—I use Joplin (TUI edition) for daily working notes (which currently go back like six years of writing almost every workday) and Obsidian for all other notes, personal or uni-related. Programming would be Visual Studio Code (Vim keybindings of course), web browsing is Firefox (although I’m looking to change to Ladybird Browser once it comes out), and music is Tidal (Spotify is bad).

I’ve recently started working towards de-Googling my setup, both for political and privacy reasons. One great service I found on European Alternatives is Jottacloud. Jottacloud covers Google Drive and Google Photos functionality with Win/Mac/Android apps, as well as Dropbox-style sync folders and automatic folder backups. However, the thing that convinced me the most was the simple Linux CLI, making all of this functionality easily available on my system. The pricing is also very competitive (maybe even cheaper than GDrive, not sure), and for the time being, even though I haven’t moved everything over yet, I’m really happy about the switch :) (And I’m finally doing frequent regular backups!)

What’s your keyboard setup like? Do you use a custom layout or custom keycaps?

So far I haven’t done much tweaking to the default setup. I’d say the main change is lowering the reaction time for a key to be registered as held—I like to type fast, and the default value was creating relatively long stops in my typing. For a similar reason, I’ve removed the backspace function from the Left Shift—I do Shift+A to jump to the end of line very often, and any delay on this was really noticeable.

What would be your dream setup?

It’s hard to say—I really haven’t thought about this much. One thing I’d love to add if I had a spare $600 lying around would be the avocado chair—I move around in my chair a lot, and I feel like the avocado chair would be great for my comfort and my back. Obviously a couple of additional headphone pairs would be nice for different listening needs, and, if we’re getting into music stuff, there’s an infinite amount of hardware I’d love to have for music making :>