From a Book Appendix to Riot Games: How Szymon Michalak Found His Path in Code

In the mid-90s, somewhere between kindergarten and first grade, a boy in Poland sat down in front of his father's COMPAQ laptop and started playing Aladdin, Super Mario and Sonic. He didn't know it yet, but that machine was the first step toward a career in software.

That boy is Szymon Michalak, a full stack developer who has worked with X-Team for close to four years. In this story, Michalak traces the unlikely spark that pulled him into web development, walks through the client project he's most proud of and shares what he's learned about balancing a demanding craft with a life that feels full.

A Book Appendix That Changed Everything

Michalak's father ran his own business for nearly three decades and believed early on that computers were the future. He made sure his son had access to one. By around 2000, Michalak had his own PC and a 56k modem — the kind that made a sound no one who heard it ever forgot.

With internet access came a book: a printed guide to Polish websites, cataloguing what you could find across the early web. Most readers would have used it to browse. Michalak read all the way to the back.

"I noticed at the end of the book a quick tutorial on how to create my own website," he says. "That's when the magic happened. I still remember that amazing feeling when I could open my page in the same 'window' where I browsed the Internet. I felt so powerful."

That first page was essentially a faster bookmarks bar — shortcuts to the sites he visited most. But it opened a door. He built blogs, uploaded photos from a Kodak digital camera and, with a group of school friends, launched a PC gaming review site that covered "maaaany games," as he puts it. He entered school competitions and lobbied teachers to accept websites in place of posters. It worked almost every time.

For a while, he thought design was his future. He spent hours studying professional artists and building elaborate web layouts. But he was honest with himself about where his talent actually lived. "My graphics were technically correct, but they missed this artistic bit," he says. "That's when I decided to go full force into web development." The decision stuck.

Building OfferCopter for Riot Games

Every project Michalak has worked on taught him something — about technology, about code standards, about becoming a better teammate. But when pressed to name one that stands out, he returns to OfferCopter, an internal tool he built for Riot Games during his first year at X-Team in 2015 and 2016.

The brief: replace a stack of manually filled Google Docs templates with an automated system for generating personalized job offers for Riot candidates. Michalak was responsible for the entire product — front-end design and UX, back-end logic and dynamically generated PDFs.

"It was also my second project that I made in React (for the client, not second ever, don't worry)," he says. "All the lessons learned from Peter Kaleta while working on the previous project had to be recalled and put into practice. I owe this gentleman a lot."

Development took about three months. He delivered before the deadline. The feedback from Riot — Rioters, in the company's internal vocabulary — was exactly what every developer hopes to hear: they were genuinely happy with what they got, and the system kept running. Nearly two and a half years after the original build, Michalak was invited back to work on it again.

That second engagement brought a different kind of satisfaction. He migrated the codebase from React 0.14 to 16, updated the full dependency tree — Redux, React-Router, webpack from v1 to v3, enzyme, eslint — and refactored code he had written years earlier. "On the one hand, it was 'what I was thinking?'" he says, "but on the other hand, I was glad to see the progress I've made."

That is, perhaps, the sharpest measure of growth available to a developer: returning to your own old work and knowing exactly how to improve it.

Travel, a Garden and What the Key Actually Is

Outside of work, Michalak is a traveler — the kind with a long wishlist and no shortage of stories. It started early, with family trips across Poland and Europe, then accelerated dramatically at 18 when his aunt invited him on a two-month overland journey through Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. He calls it "something entirely different from what I saw before" — and credits it with making travel a permanent obsession.

Since then: six months studying in Melbourne, a month in South Africa and countless shorter loops around Europe. One recent summer, he and his family drove 6,000 kilometers through the Austrian Alps, the Italian lakes and Tuscan wine country.

When he's not traveling, he tends a large garden surrounding the house outside the city where he and his family now live. Mowing the lawn alone takes two to three hours a week in summer. He describes the upkeep as demanding and the satisfaction as "priceless." The house is surrounded by forest. "The vast amount of the fresh air, quiet and peaceful atmosphere lets me forget about any 'roadblocks' I encounter and lets my mind roam freely," he says.

His daughter Zosia was born in 2018, a year he describes simply as "amazing." His goals for the year ahead were straightforward: more travel, more time together and continuing the AWS and cloud certifications he had begun — plus keeping an eye on where technologies like Reason and Vue.js would land.

When asked what mark he wants to leave on the world, Michalak doesn't reach for a product, a startup or a line of code. He grew up surrounded by cousins, close to a brother, and married into a family of six brothers. That context shapes how he answers.

"I strongly believe that a loving, caring family is one of the most important keys to a happy life," he says. "I will do my best to show my kids the world in the best way I can. I really can't wait to start exploring things again with them — I feel like this will be the universe in which I will leave the biggest mark."

For a developer who has shipped production code across multiple continents and industries, the most ambitious project on his roadmap has nothing to do with a framework.

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