I'm Bartosz Frąckowiak. For twelve-plus years I've been building distributed systems in production, and studying the humans and org charts that shape them. Every week I write about both: the architecture, the people, and the corporate machine they form together.
12+ years in distributed systems PhD research, University of Warsaw Top 3% on Toptal Architect at a global SaaS platform
Weekly essays on architecture, people, and the corporate machine. New signal most Mondays.
The ticket said "saved filters". The real decisions were which service, whose identity, and how little to invent.
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2026.07.20
2026.07.13
2026.07.06I started by trying to formalize architecture in a PhD, learned in production why people bend every formal model, and now lead an AI transformation across hundreds of engineers. The essays below are the receipts from each stage.
University taught elegant models. Production taught their price. A CS degree in Toruń, the first .NET jobs, the first incident — and the lasting discovery that no theory survives deployment unchanged.
Built a formal language for validating software architecture. The honest result: boxes and arrows can be formalized — the forces that bend them are organizational. That tension powers every essay on this site.
Every engagement was two systems: the codebase, and the organization around it. Senior consultant and team leader across client projects and offshore teams. The second system was never in the repository — and usually mattered more.
Led a 15-year legacy monolith toward microservices. CI/CD where there was none, domain-driven design as the shared language, repositories that merged themselves — and the hard conversations no diagram captures. Also the era that taught me "technical leader" is two jobs wearing one badge.
Architecture across 20+ bounded contexts on an event-driven Azure platform. Decision records, governance, integration design — and the discovery that most architecture work is deciding who decides. The sharpest tool at this altitude is a well-aimed question, not a diagram.
AI-native engineering across fifteen squads and several hundred developers. An agentic tech radar that turns signals into decisions, probabilistic metrics for work no database records, and a prompt-driven architecture practice. This blog exists because that work keeps producing field notes worth publishing.
Three products, one person, all in production. An invoicing SaaS wrestling the government e-invoicing spec and its parliament-written edge cases, an architecture-modeling tool where the diagram cannot lie because it is the code, and a self-hosted scheduler in Go. Proof of shipping — and an endless source of material.
"To be the architect who connects classic distributed-systems discipline with an AI-native way of working — and to show, in public, one essay a week, how systems and the people who build them actually behave."
Everything I offer comes from practice: the same systems, radars, and workflows I write about.
Strategic architecture reviews, system design advisory, and hands-on guidance for the decisions where a wrong call costs months.
Workshops and mentoring that give engineers the architectural thinking their companies keep expecting them to absorb by osmosis.
I lead an AI transformation across several hundred developers. I'll teach your team the workflows that survived contact with reality.
Evaluating a consulting engagement, planning team training, or just want to argue with one of my essays: I answer everything within two business days.