Karol Binkowski

About

I'm the engineer you call when the brief is a Slack thread.

Engineer and builder, based in Kraków, working remote-first and international. I take projects that are stuck, vague, or moving too slow — and ship them. AI products, backends, performance work, whatever the problem actually is.

The short version

The work I'm proudest of usually started the same way: no brief, a real deadline, and a problem that turned out to be different from the one on the ticket. I find the real one and ship it.

I care more about why a decision was made than that the code runs. Code that runs but can't explain itself has a six-month fuse — the day you need to change it, the reasoning is gone and you're guessing. So I write it down. Trade-offs visible, decisions documented — your team gets the technical detail, your investors get the business case.

Karol Binkowski

How I think

Context before code

Give me a vague brief and I read everything — the repo, the tickets, the Slack thread where the real requirement is hiding. Most bad decisions are just missing context dressed up as a deadline.

Options and trade-offs, not one answer

I show up with a map: three ways to do this, what each one costs, which one I'd pick and why. The reasoning outlives the code.

I own the outcome

If I commit to shipping, shipping is my problem — including the parts nobody scoped. Risks flagged early, in writing. You're never surprised, never chasing me.

What people say

"He consistently delivered high-quality code, was reliable, and eager to take on challenging tasks. I particularly appreciated his proactive attitude and ability to work effectively within the team. He also showed strong support for introducing Scrum practices, which positively impacted our way of working. I can confidently recommend Karol as a solid and dependable engineer."
— Marcin Ostrowski · Agile Leader & Coach
"Karol stands out for his openness to dialogue and to sharing knowledge. He regularly proposed new technologies and brought in innovative solutions that improved the projects we worked on — and you could always count on him to ask the brave questions that helped the team find the best answer."
— Anna Wilk · Scrum Master (translated from Polish)

Stack

Frontend

  • React
  • Next.js
  • TypeScript
  • Vue
  • Nuxt
  • Astro

Mobile / native

  • React Native
  • Expo
  • Native Modules

Backend

  • Node.js
  • Laravel / PHP
  • Python
  • REST
  • Event sourcing

AI

  • Claude Code
  • AI SDK
  • GPT-4
  • Gemini

Infra & tooling

  • AWS
  • Azure
  • Docker
  • GitHub Actions
  • Playwright
  • CI/CD

AWS Certified · CS50 (Harvard) · 3+ years shipping production software

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