Piotr Orłowski is a Linux champion. He started his career by “jabbing” straight at a programming role which led him to “hook” a job as a DevOps with Prime Engineering Poland. We had the opportunity to talk to him a little and ask him a few questions.

Piotr, let’s start with a basic question. How did you discover your true passion?

I studied Business and Information Technology at Coventry University and graduated with a Bachelor of Science in July of 2019. This course and the amount of time spent on personal projects played a key role in terms of finding my true field of interest. That’s when I discovered that programming, Linux administration and everything else but IT was my true passion.

Tell us what led you to Prime Engineering Poland

After over a year at IBM, I gained a lot of useful knowledge. However, after some time, I couldn’t really find a task that truly challenged me. Most of my daily duties seemed trivial and repeatable.

That’s when I started digging around LinkedIn trying to find a new role that would allow me to fully utilise my skills and suddenly one of Prime Engineering’s recruiters messaged me about a DevOps position. At that time, I thought that was exactly the challenge I was looking for, so I quickly accepted to go through the interviews and immediately received a job offer.

So far how has it been working with Prime?

So far so good. I joined the project during a very busy period and the first weeks were quite intense. This has its pros and cons obviously. I believe that if I spend more time now, I will surely better understand the entire code infrastructure, which will hopefully result in less time spent on upcoming projects.

We heard that you got hooked on boxing. When and why did you start practicing this sport?

 Unfortunately, my job involves a lot of sitting in front of a computer, which is definitely not the healthiest way of living. I realised that a year ago when my legs and back started to hurt badly. That was the moment when I decided to add a few sports to my daily routine. I first started with just a simple strength workout with my trainer and then after a few months, I decided to mix that together with boxing training just out of curiosity. As a result, I slowly started feeling a lot better overall, I had more energy throughout the day and most importantly, my pain disappeared.

Boxing takes a lot of commitment and patience, right? In some sense, so does programming. What advice do you have for others looking to pursue a career like yours?

Yes indeed. Both of these ‘activities’ take a lot of commitment and patience, but for me, it always comes naturally whenever I’m doing things that I truly like. I believe this is actually the best kind of advice I can give to anyone, as this is the only one that worked out in my case. I kept on searching for my true passion for many years and finally discovered it during my studies. Once I finally found it, I spent a lot of days and nights working on my portfolio projects, because I knew that with enough patience and a lot of effort, my hard work would be noticed.