About · Szymon Chudy
I care about the why before the how.
Over a decade of shipping products for the web, and, in an earlier life, a stage and a full house. I like clear code, kind teams, and problems worth arguing about over coffee.
- Staff Software Engineer
- @Netflix
- UI
- Frontend
- Design Systems
- Architecture
The longer story
How I got here, and what I'm chasing.
"A thousand gigs taught me one trick: over-prepare, then let the plan go the moment it meets the room."
I came to engineering sideways. For most of my twenties I was a session musician: a jazz performance degree, a battered instrument case, and more than a thousand gigs, from tiny back rooms to festival stages of twenty thousand people. It taught me to prepare for months and then improvise the moment the plan met reality. That turns out to be most of the job in software, too.
These days I'm a UI Engineer at Netflix, working on design systems and the tools other engineers build with. I care most about the parts users never see: reliability, accessibility, the small moments of polish that add up to something that feels right. What I'm after is a platform where the engineers and agents building on it get to think about the product they're shipping, while the plumbing stays out of their way.
I try to be the kind of teammate I'd want on a hard week: generous with what I know, honest about what I don't, curious about the people I build with. If that sounds like your kind of person, I'd love to say hi.
How I try to work
A few things I believe.
Kindness compounds.
Being generous with your time and what you know is not a tax on the work — over a career it's the highest-return investment you can make. Teams remember how you made them feel on the hard weeks.
The details are the design.
Users rarely notice the reliability, the accessibility, the empty states, the loading moment done right. They notice the absence of all of it. I try to sweat the parts no one will thank me for.
Strong opinions, gently held.
Argue hard about the idea, stay soft about the person. The goal is the best answer in the room, not being the one who said it. I've changed my mind in public more times than I can count.
Stay a beginner.
The moment I feel like an expert is the moment I stop learning. I'd rather ask the obvious question and be humbled than protect the illusion of knowing everything.
What I'm into now
Where my attention goes these days.
Right now I'm deep in the unglamorous middle of a platform: the APIs, defaults, and docs that decide whether hundreds of engineers (and agents) have a good day. It's slow, compounding work, and I've come to love it.
I also think AI won't take our jobs so much as reshape them, for the better. But we're the ones steering that change, and steering it well takes judgment other people can rely on. So even with all the pressure to think about nothing but AI, I keep digging into the boring fundamentals: architecture, accessibility, performance budgets, tests that catch real bugs. It's where craft lives.
That's also why I'm writing more than I ever have, and writing it myself, leaning on AI as little as a non-native English speaker can. Mostly I'm documenting the journey for me, but in the spirit of the free internet, I put it out there in case someone finds it useful. If a post saves one person an afternoon of the confusion I had, that's a good trade.
Away from the keyboard
The rest of the picture.
A previous life
Ten years as a session musician
A master's in jazz performance and a thousand-plus gigs — from smoky clubs to crowds of twenty thousand. I don't play professionally anymore, but the instincts stuck: read the room, hold the groove, and make everyone around you sound better.
- 1,000+ gigs
- Crowds to 20k
- Multiplatinum records
At home
A family man
The people who keep me grounded. Most of the best parts of my week happen far away from a screen.
Outdoors
A hiker
Long trails and longer thinking. Nothing resets a stuck problem like a few thousand feet of elevation.
On court
A tennis player
Weekend rallies and the occasional questionable line call. I'm competitive, but mostly in it for the friends.
Say hello
Don't be a stranger
Want to talk design systems, swap trail recommendations, or argue about a jazz record? My inbox is open and I answer everything. The best collaborations I've had started with an out-of-the-blue hello.