About

About Me

I’m Pawel Zelawski. Professionally I work in technical product management - a role that sits at the boundary between engineering and the problems software is meant to solve. Years in that position have given me a grounded understanding of how systems are actually built, what makes them fail, and what separates well-designed infrastructure from the kind that gets quietly rewritten.

Outside of work I build things. Specifically, I write C11 systems software targeting Linux and OpenBSD - low-level libraries and tools aimed at gaps I find in the FOSS C ecosystem. I approach this with a strict design-first methodology: full architecture and documentation before any implementation begins, every decision made deliberately and locked before moving forward. I rely on AI as an implementation partner in this process, but the approach is far from vibe coding - I’ll write about it in more detail in a dedicated post.

My other serious interest is blockchain and cryptocurrency. Not from a speculative angle - the cryptographic primitives, protocol design, and the broader question of decentralised trust are what I actually find compelling.

Cybersecurity runs through most of what I do. On the systems side it shows up in security hardening, privilege separation, and careful handling of failure modes. More broadly it’s a lens I apply to how software and infrastructure are designed and operated.

This site is where I write about things I think are worth saying - technical opinions, project notes, and whatever else I find interesting. Nothing here represents the views of any employer, past or present.

You can find me on LinkedIn.