Two years later — where I've been

Hi. It's been a while.

The last time I posted regularly, I was a few weeks into my first developer job, still getting used to the idea that someone was paying me to write code. That was two years ago, back in Derby, UK, where I'd just been hired as a full-stack PHP developer at Sort Group. The blog went quiet not because I stopped having things to say, but because I got busy actually living the next chapter — and once the old domain lapsed, it felt easier to let the silence continue than to explain the gap.

So here's the update, and it's bigger than I expected to be writing.

Four months into that PHP role, I applied for what I can only call a dream job — a System Engineering role at Backbase, back in Kraków, the city I grew up in. It wasn't just a career move. My wife, kids, and I had been building our life together in the UK, but this opportunity meant we could all move home, back to where the rest of our family is. After four rounds of interviews, I got the offer, closed my business, and we made the move together.

I joined Backbase almost two years ago, and I'm still there today, spending my days in Terraform, CI/CD pipelines, and Azure Cloud. The first year was rough, if I'm honest. I didn't know Terraform. I didn't know Azure. Half the acronyms in meetings went straight over my head, and I spent a lot of evenings just trying to understand what people meant. But somewhere in the last few months it started clicking, and I'm enjoying this work more than I ever have. It's been a difficult beginning, but I still love what I do. It's a long way from CakePHP and Stack Overflow tabs at 3 AM. It's an even longer way from a truck cab in Derby, which is where this whole story started.

I'm relaunching this blog under my own name — michalzawadzki.dev — instead of the old Coding Crossroads domain. Partly that's practical: I don't own the old one anymore. But it also feels right. The crossroads was real, and I'm not pretending it wasn't, but I'm not standing at it anymore. I'm a few years down the road now, and I'd rather write from there.

What's changing, and what isn't: I'm still going to write the way I always have — honestly, about things I actually went through rather than advice I lifted from somewhere else. What's different is the subject matter will lean more into what I actually do all day now: infrastructure, cloud, CI/CD, and lately a lot of curiosity about where AI fits into that work. I'll still write about the journey when it's worth writing about, but most of what's coming next lives in this new chapter, not the old one.

If you followed the original story — thank you for sticking around long enough to see this. If you're new here: welcome. I'm Michał. I used to drive a lorry. Now I work in cloud infrastructure, back in the city I grew up in, with my family and the rest of ours around us again. In between, there was a bootcamp, a lot of late nights, and more people who helped me than I can properly thank in one post.

More soon.