How a 2-Million-Download Android Game Put Rafał Wilinski on the Path to Professional Dev

At 17, Rafał Wilinski released an Android game called Voxel Rush — a minimal, fast-paced arcade experience where players rush through an endless space, trying to reach the furthest distance without crashing into obstacles. With limited programming knowledge, he had to write his own JSON parser just to get the backend talking to the client. It only worked if the server response was exactly 20 characters long.

In over two years, Voxel Rush had been downloaded over 2 million times.

That scrappy, figure-it-out-as-you-go start shaped the engineer Wilinski became: a Node.js and AWS developer at X-Team who approaches work — and life — with the same drive he brought to that first project. In this story, Wilinski traces how indie game development ignited his career, how music and movement keep him sharp, and why he ditched rigid schedules in favor of something he calls "surfing the tides of moods."

From Arcade Games to Real Programming

Wilinski's entry into software wasn't through a computer science degree or a bootcamp. It was through a game engine.

Before web development entered the picture, he was deep in indie mobile game development — teaching himself to build, ship and iterate on Android titles as a teenager. The market rewarded the effort: Voxel Rush's 2-million-download run was remarkable for its era, when the app stores were less crowded and a well-timed, well-designed game could still find organic reach.

The toughest challenge on that first project wasn't the physics or the game mechanics — it was the real-time multiplayer mode. "It took me more than two weeks to implement that," Wilinski says, "but it was a really rewarding experience." Game development, he learned, operates on a different plane than most software work. Code runs simultaneously across many actors in a 3D space, which surfaces bugs that ordinary web projects never produce. He once spent three days hunting a collision bug, only to discover it lived not in the code but in the collision mesh itself — a lesson in where to look when the obvious places come up empty.

His second game didn't perform as well, and the social pressure of peers who saw game development as less serious than "real programming" eventually tipped the scales. He pivoted to JavaScript — with a wry acknowledgment that JS qualified as a "REAL programming language" — and eventually built toward the Node.js and AWS work that brought him to X-Team roughly 18 months before this interview.

The Music Studio and the Weight Room

Code is only part of what Wilinski does between 9 a.m. and midnight.

He plays piano — and the instrument has been pulling him in new directions. After buying one and attempting to plug it into his computer for mixing, the experiment didn't go as planned. What emerged instead was an unexpected detour into electronic and techno music production — the genre he now likes the most. He has drafts and unfinished compositions, none of which fully satisfy him yet. "I know that done is better perfect," he says, "but I simply cannot apply this principle to art." The loops he can build, though, give him genuine joy — a creative outlet that operates entirely outside the logic of sprints and deliverables.

Physical training holds an equally firm place in his routine. For Wilinski, a programmer who spends hours planted in front of a monitor, movement isn't a nice-to-have — it's structural. Calisthenics — bodyweight training with no equipment — and cycling are his primary activities. They keep him healthy and, just as importantly, give his mind somewhere to go. "It's really important for me to do a proper workout afterward," he says of long coding sessions. "It doesn't only keep me healthy physically, but also helps sort out all my thoughts."

The balance between code, music and body isn't accidental. It reflects a deliberate philosophy about what high performance actually requires.

Surfing the Tides Instead of Fighting Them

Wilinski's most counterintuitive insight is the one that gives this piece its name — and the one most at odds with standard productivity advice.

He does not wake at 6 a.m. to tick off tasks. He tried it. It didn't work. Instead, his schedule is what he calls "flow-based" — structured around reading his own energy levels and leaning into them rather than overriding them with a fixed plan. "It's essential to listen to your own body, your mind, and try to adapt and surf on those 'tides of moods,'" he says. "If you feel like it's not the best day to work out because you just feel weak, then don't do it. If you feel like 'today is the day, I'm going to deliver 20 sprint points,' then go ahead."

The approach demands something harder than a rigid routine: self-trust. He has to know he can still meet deadlines without a calendar alarm telling him when to start. That confidence, he says, came from putting himself through extreme pressure early on — sleeping five hours a night while working full-time, studying full-time and building his own projects simultaneously. That sustained overload forced him to develop a filter: to figure out what actually mattered and what could be cut.

The one experiment that failed completely was the to-do list. He found that the sight of uncompleted tasks corroded his sense of self. "Waking up with 4 undone tasks from yesterday, as well as 22 tasks left to do today — that's a terrible feeling," he says. He returned to the flow method, with small adjustments to keep his output more predictable for the teams depending on him.

What does he want to build next — in code, in music, in life? He's honest about not knowing. His answer is the work itself: to keep creating, keep meeting people and keep showing up with passion. For an engineer who began by reinventing the wheel at 17 — and made 2 million people glad he did — that's not a non-answer. It's a method.

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