About

I’m Piotr Usewicz — a software engineer who’s been building for the web since 2004.

I started with PHP in Warsaw, building content management systems and e-commerce platforms. In 2006 I discovered Ruby on Rails and never looked back. That led me from Poland to London, where I spent a few years building distributed Erlang and Ruby applications — at Mobile Interactive Group, AOL, HouseTrip, and a stint in Palo Alto at Mixbook.

From London I moved to Dublin, where I worked on Homestay Technologies’ vacation rental platform. I joined Harvest while still in Dublin in late 2014, and eventually moved to Spain. I spent nearly eleven years at Harvest as a senior software engineer, working on their time tracking and resource planning products.

Today I work independently from Benicàrlo, a small town on the Spanish Mediterranean coast. I consult, take on contract work, and build things of my own. Outside of work, I tinker with game development — layer22.games is where that lives. I care about readable code, sensible defaults, and software that stays maintainable long after the initial excitement fades.

What I work with

Ruby and Rails have been my primary tools for almost twenty years. On the frontend I’ve worked extensively with React and Preact — at Harvest we were migrating a large Backbone/jQuery codebase to React, then Preact. These days I also reach for Hotwire and Stimulus. I’ve written production Erlang, Node.js, and PHP in past lives. I’m comfortable across the full stack — from database schema to deployment pipeline.

This site

Built with Jekyll, styled with Tailwind CSS, typeset in Barlow Condensed. Deployed to Cloudflare Pages. Source on GitHub.

Elsewhere

I’m mostly on GitHub and Mastodon. Also on Bluesky and LinkedIn.