Most engineers are paid to solve problems within a system. Michal Kawalec is more interested in improving the system itself.
Kawalec is a principal software engineer at X-Team, an active contributor to the functional programming community in Poland and the founder of Monadic Warsaw, a Haskell meetup that grew from a local gathering into a community hosting some of the most influential Haskell programmers. His path there wound through Mathematical Physics, a brief detour away from code and a love of computing that started well before high school.
In this story, Kawalec shares how he found his way back to programming after nearly walking away, why functional programming is his lens for better software and how remote work reshaped his thinking about documentation — and about freedom.
An Unlikely Return to Code
Kawalec came to computers early. Before high school, he was buying books on C++ and HTML and running experiments on an old PC. One of those books was a pretty small one — about a hundred pages on HTML and "the amazing new inventions of DHTML."
He studied Mathematical Physics after high school — and decided, for about a year, that programming wasn't for him. Then he noticed something that changed the trajectory of his career: he was simply better at it than his peers.
"I helped a professor write software that analyzed events from the ATLAS detector," he says, "and ultimately got a job writing web apps for a university." The programming instinct, dormant for a year, came back fast. It hasn't left since.
What sustained him through the early years wasn't a single mentor or a defined career plan — it was a pull in two directions at once. "There are two sides to this," he says of his motivation. "One, I want to help solve people's problems and make their businesses more efficient. Two, I'm trying to understand how we can improve programming itself." He sees those forces as complementary: real-world problems keep him grounded; the deeper questions keep him curious.
Functional Programming and the Meetup That Took Off
For Kawalec, the answer to "how we can improve programming" runs through functional programming. The appeal is structural: abstract away the common parts, write code that is clean and easier to maintain. Less repetition. Fewer surprises.
"I'm a long-time fan of functional programming. Abstract away the common parts and write code that is clean and easier to maintain," he says.
That conviction led him to start Monadic Warsaw, a Haskell meetup in Poland, a few years before this interview. He wanted a venue to talk with others who were serious about functional languages. The response surprised him.
"It took off like a rocket ship," he says. The group grew to hundreds of members and hosted some of the most influential Haskell programmers.
What Remote Work Actually Demands
Kawalec is direct about what remote work gets right — and what it asks of the people doing it.
The efficiency case comes first: office environments often require presence over productivity, and the informal communication that fills in-person days tends to leave knowledge undocumented. "While this works to an extent," he says, "it becomes vividly painful that this practice is not a good idea when you have to return to a project a year later or when someone with unique knowledge leaves your company."
Remote work fixes this by necessity. When you cannot lean over a desk, you write things down. Good sharing practices, he argues, quickly become second nature.
The freedom is real too — the ability to structure your day around your own rhythms rather than an office schedule. But Kawalec is careful not to oversell it. Remote work requires a higher degree of dedication, he notes: no one will push you to start, and you have to genuinely love what you're doing. "It's not for everyone," he says, "but the payoffs are immense."
What drives him beyond any single project or tool is a broader ambition — to solve hard problems, do interesting things and leave the world a little better than he found it. The details, he admits, he tends to make up as he goes.
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