The Polymesh Association expands with a new hire! Meet Marcin Pastecki, Senior Platform Engineer

The Polymesh Association is excited to announce a new hire! Joining the team is Marcin Pastecki as Senior Platform Engineer. 

Marcin has more than 17 years of experience in Information Technology (IT), including experience with Polymesh infrastructure from his prior role at Polymath. He joined Polymath in 2021, playing a key role in infrastructure management for the initial deployment of Polymesh and later the Capital Platform built on top of it. 

Before working in blockchain, Marcin worked in IT roles managing infrastructure teams and consulting for various projects. He holds a BSc in Computer Science from the Katowice Institute of Information Technologies.

Below, we chat to Marcin about his role and familiarity with Polymesh, what infrastructure management entails, blockchain projects he finds interesting, his view on the industry long-term, and what he’d tell developers just beginning their career journey or venture into blockchain.

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What is your role at the Polymesh Association? 

Marcin: I’m joining the Infrastructure Platform Team as Senior Platform Engineer. This team is responsible for everything related to our CI/CD (continuous information/delivery) processes and managing our whole IT infrastructure. 

The main goal of the platform team is to provide developers with an environment that’s easy to use while also secure and reliable. Those are buzzwords, but that is the idea. On the infrastructure team, it’s my responsibility to ensure infrastructure-related tooling meets this goal. 

With a team dedicated to this, our infrastructure and services become faster and more quickly available to developers and the community.

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What does infrastructure at Polymesh entail?

Marcin: A lot of engineering work happens in the background, but the end goal is to make the application available to customers, clients, and the community. An application can be many things. We have applications within the platform team, applications visible to the outside world, and applications that we manage and deploy for internal use only. 

For the Polymesh Association, some examples include those we offer as open services to the community – the Polymesh Portal, the Polymesh App, APIs, and others – as well as core blockchain-related services and the nodes themselves – RPC nodes, Bootnodes, and Operator nodes. 

Developers code, compile, and test, running everything locally on their machine. Their involvement usually ends there, but it’s important to ensure their code is available to the outside world. This process is highly complex. Platform infrastructure is responsible for taking that complexity away from developers, letting them trigger deployment simply while making the whole thing usable or deployable by everyone. Ensuring high levels of security is also a central focus.

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How will you leverage your prior experience at Polymath, which uses Polymesh, to provide infrastructure management full-time for Polymesh?

Marcin: There are similarities between the infrastructure platforms of the two entities, both in terms of tools used to deliver end products and platform functions. This means I have a head start in understanding Polymesh infrastructure.‍

‍While the Infrastructure Platform will be my main focus, there are a lot of opportunities to leverage my experience with a range of technologies and products to improve the ecosystem in other ways. Making certain aspects of the chain more visible to the community is one of them. 

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What initially drew you to the field of blockchain?

Marcin: As a technology, blockchain has very unique characteristics that make it well-suited for certain applications. Tokenized securities – like stocks – are one application that makes sense. 

Today’s world of investing has tons of gray areas, where no information is easily available to investors. Much of the process is controlled by single entities, with little visibility into what happens. But with blockchain, there’s transparency. 

It also opens up possibilities for greater democratization. For some asset types, it’s not even possible to invest without being an accredited investor with a lot of wealth. Blockchain changes this by enabling more people to invest in more diverse types of assets. 

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Where do you see the blockchain industry heading?

Marcin:  In my opinion, recent headlines should all end with a positive impact for the mid or long-term. Once blockchain gains more clarity in terms of regulation, everyone will benefit.

Blockchain technology is gaining traction thanks to the number of great projects that exist, as well as growing familiarity with what it is and how to use it. The grassroots work happening all around us is very impactful. 

We can divide these projects into two types. The first is the generic one aimed at a broader audience, where focus on overall security and fraud prevention should further accelerate adoption. Then we have more specialized projects such as Polymesh, where security risks are lowered significantly. I believe that the unique features of these projects make them prime candidates for significant adoption and growth. 

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What blockchain projects or use cases do you find particularly interesting?

Marcin: Blockchain has political implications as well as economic. One use I think is very interesting is local governance, where blockchain can be used to improve the lives of citizens in local communities, towns, or counties. For example, it can optimize processes and make sure public data is used to improve various areas e.g. healthcare, transportation, or school systems. Platforms for e-voting can provide ways to participate in local governance in secure and simple ways. 

In Poland, we have laws saying that public data has to be freely available, but no standards as to what format. Different counties use different standards, which makes gathering data and conducting research difficult. Blockchain can help erase this problem by providing a platform for public information exchange where standards can be enforced and data can be tracked and verified. 

Likewise, voting is different between counties, and data isn’t always available. Blockchain can be implemented to help. For example, counties have funds local to the county that citizens can subject project proposals for and vote on what they’d like to see implemented. Blockchain would help enforce standards here, make the process transparent, and help in accountability. 

It can even go a step further, enabling areas traditionally voted on by representatives – such as passing a bill – to include a mix of both representative and citizen voting. I’m not necessarily talking about a popular vote or making every vote equal. You could have proportional voting where representatives have, say, 80% of the vote, and the people have 20%. Blockchain technology makes this easier and introduces new possibilities for what voting can look like.  

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What advice would you give to developers wanting to begin building on blockchain or just beginning their career?

Marcin: Don’t let lack of experience discourage you from trying. I didn’t have any blockchain experience before joining Polymath either. Everyone in the industry has been in that place at some point! 

For me, what benefits self-development is working on projects from scratch and working with more experienced developers. The former forces you to become familiar with a wide range of aspects related to product delivery, especially if you are the only one involved or the project leader. The latter gives you a major boost in the efficiency and speed of learning new things and best practices. 

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What book, podcast, or online material about the industry had the most impact on you or you would recommend to others? 

Marcin: Know what works for you. In my case, I like video courses, which you can find on Udemy, Coursera, MIT’s openlearning, and the list goes on. Check public opinion, listen to the free episodes, make sure the teaching method works for you, and focus on learning. This works well for general concepts. 

For more specialized topics, O’Reilly or similar subscriptions have helped me. There’s also plenty of great content on Youtube and across different websites and services. I’d also recommend engaging with the community, as most people love to help others. 

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Marcin can be found on Github. 

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Please wish Marcin a happy welcome in Discord!