Or Tomasz Śmigla, if you can read that without going through too much trouble, and you’ve made it to my personal homepage. I bet these were much more exciting back in the early 2000s. Well, I was just a few years old then, so I couldn’t have experienced it firsthand. Still, after I first touched a Windows 95 PC sometime in the early years of the twenty-first century (right after I promptly learned how to read and move around without falling down), I decided it was something I wanted to do more. Much more.
So here I am, doing quite a few things in the digital world, both for fun and to make a living (which is, after all, as they say, the best combination you could wish for). I’m the creator and main editor of the tech portal TechTactician, where you can find a fair amount of quality information and content about local AI software, hardware we all mostly want but can’t afford (and some of which you can easily get for a few bucks), and lots of thematic guides and how-to’s based on my experience with various pieces of technology I’ve come across in my life.
Supported by a group of friends, I push on with this journalistic project paired with the YouTube channel TechAntics, in hopes that it will keep serving as a nice and up-to-date repository of knowledge for all interested. Aside from that, I’m also leading a neat little side project that has to do with DJ equipment, that is DJGear2k. As a hobby, I like to explore the fields of computer network security, which often comes with the pleasure of being able to break things for fun, without facing any consequences—who wouldn’t like that?
When I’m not preoccupied with that, I tend to turn to photography and videography, which I pursue both from the sides of commercial, journalistic, and artistic photography, having amassed quite a bit of equipment and experience over the last ten or so years.
Oh, and there’s also music. Having about 14 years of music education behind me, I play a few instruments including the piano and electric guitar, although I wouldn’t say that I’m particularly good at any of them. I’ve shifted from classical tunes to more harsh and experimental sounds, now mostly focusing on my personal projects going on behind the scenes in my little home studio. Although I’m not really a religious person anymore, I still have a lot of love in my heart for sacral music. In fact, I’d been learning to play pipe organ for nearly seven years before I got my certificate and had to move on with other things in my life.
When it comes to something that some people might try calling an academic career, I’ve finished both my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Cultural Studies (with a specialization in Cyberculture & Media, and with my theses revolving around social engineering) at a Jesuit University in Krakow — quite a journey, considering that mixing the humanities and exact sciences within my fields of interest has really broadened my perspective on many, many things. Now I’m happily pursuing a PhD in the very same field, exploring the use of digital tools in the analysis and exploration of archival texts, which some of you might know as part of a larger endeavor sometimes called digital humanities.
Although I’m never really excited about the future, I’m very thankful to all the people who have been a part of my rather busy life up to this point, especially both my online and offline friends, who might not know it, but to whom I owe a whole lot.
So, while I’m passionate about many things in this tiny little pursuit of knowledge that is my life, I mostly dabble in web journalism (with TechTactician being my labour-of-love project), open-source software, photo, video and audio editing, photography, personal music projects, and bar-hopping, when I’m in the right mood.
I almost forgot — I also draw, as a little side quest of mine. If you want, you can see some of my art on my social media profiles, or, when I hand you a small piece of paper with some of my scribbles, accepting no returns.
Despite what you might think after eyeing all this text above, I don’t really like writing about myself. Still, I thought that this page would look rather sad if it was just the image of my likeness somewhere below, with a small and laconic note about what I’m up to recently.
If you’ve somehow read all this, you now know more about me than many of my colleagues. I, for one, thank you for sticking around this long. But it’s time to end this little introduction now. May we meet again, should fate allow it~
Tom