Recent content on Adam Koszek - Personal Website
Every now and then I stumble upon a question of Salesforce CRM dominance. Opinions on forums are split, to the point where one sees it as a product of two radicals: folks who hate it and folks that love it. Seeing things from inside of Salesforce (2017–2019), what I think we, the techies, the weirdos, the startup founders don’t get is that Marc Benioff is a founder too. He’s giving…
TV is broken. The opportunity seems enormous, and someone will make a lot of money they fix it. Do your own research. It might be a graveyard of startups. But on the surface, in the AI era, a small team can win this fast. The premise is: TV is a piece of furniture that does almost nothing, most of the time. And nearly everyone owns one. The market is all over: different brands, different sets —…
I built Agent Glass. Beautiful, isn’t it? This baby has three panes: Sidebar with all the stuff you need right away. Click around, don’t be scared. The list of stuff you’re supposed to be looking at is the middle pane: think of it as an index of everything that you went through with AI agents. All your conversations will be listed here. Most of your eye’s time will be on…
Current Focus I’m building Konobase , an AI data platform for regulated industries. We help teams in healthcare, finance, and compliance-heavy sectors search, organize, and use sensitive data safely. This is where most of my time goes – product, engineering, and go-to-market. Outside of Konobase, I work with a small number of founders and companies on technical advisory. I tend to…
Startup CTO Over the 2019–2025 I’ve maintained some notes on the process of starting https://www.segmed.ai and developments/beliefs that either turned right, or the ones that were completely wrong. This was mostly to see how I’m doing on a tech/biz decision trajectory. The more I looked at it, the more is started to sound like a story. Two YC friends picked my brain on some…
Adam Ko-shek. That’s it. Adam - Standard English pronunciation Koszek - /KO-shek/ My full name is Wojciech Adam Koszek. Wojciech is for folks who knew me before I moved to the US, or Polish folks who can handle a tongue twister: /VOY-chekh/.
I’m the CEO/Founder of Konobase , an AI data platform for regulated industries. We help teams in healthcare, finance, and compliance-heavy sectors search, organize, and use sensitive data safely. I’ve spent 25 years building technology, from operating systems to AI products. I’ve raised venture capital, built teams, and navigated FDA and HIPAA constraints in regulated…
Get in touch. I’m always interested in connecting with makers building interesting technology, or anyone interested in my work. My email is “adam” at my lastname dot com. Links Twitter : @wkoszek LinkedIn : linkedin.com/in/wkoszek GitHub : github.com/wkoszek Speaking I regularly speak at Stanford GSB Stanford Ignite .
Companies I’ve built, scaled, and advised. Current Konobase Founder & CEO AI data platform for regulated industries. We help teams in healthcare, finance, and compliance-heavy sectors search, organize, and use sensitive data safely. Previous Segmed Cofounder & CTO Built the first platform for ethical sourcing of medical imaging data. HIPAA-compliant, privacy-preserving infrastructure that…
111 public repositories on GitHub . Selected projects below. Products & Platforms Konobase — AI data platform for regulated industries. Helps teams in healthcare, finance, and compliance-heavy sectors search, organize, and use sensitive data safely. bsub.io — Batch processing platform for running Docker containers at scale. CLI, REST API, and SDK interfaces. GPU support for ML workloads.…
Some of my papers written over the years ( also on Google Scholar ) “Generating Synthetic Data for Medical Imaging” Lennart R. Koetzier, Jie Wu, Domenico Mastrodicasa, Aline Lutz, Matthew Chung, Adam Koszek, Jayanth Pratap, Akshay S. Chaudhari, Pranav Rajpurkar, Matthew P. Lungren, Martin J. Willemink Paper: Radiology 2024 ( DOI ), 2024 Journal: Radiology, Volume 312, Issue 3…
Non-Tech Founder Technology Guide This book is a sister book to the CTO book. The notes about non-tech communication that didn’t fit into my CTO book will end up here. Story is that after pitching N VCs and talking hundreds of vendors, suppliers, hospital execs it was becoming very clear that explaining complex technology to non-technical audience will be CTO’s day-to-day. It also…
Today I learned how to stash specific files in Git instead of stashing all changes. The Problem Sometimes you’re working on multiple changes but only want to stash some of them. The standard git stash command stashes all modified files, which isn’t always what you want. The Solution You can use the git stash push command with specific file paths: git stash push -m 'My partial stash'…
Today I learned how to create custom shortcodes in Hugo to make content creation more efficient. What are Shortcodes? Shortcodes are simple snippets inside your content files that Hugo will render using predefined templates. They’re a great way to add custom HTML or reusable components without writing raw HTML in your Markdown files. Creating a Basic Shortcode To create a shortcode, add an…
European Union has a law that addressed privacy issues of the Internet users. The law regulates a technology called HTTP Cookies , which is a clunky but necessary way of storing state on user’s computer. There’s quite a bit of a background in here, and I don’t want to diverge the discussion to technical topics too much. To make it short: license plate on your car can be used for…
Trying to take the first steps in drawing with this book is much easier. I wanted to get more professional lesson and do something about my mindless doodling, and this book was the right purchase. If you’ve never drawn, you get to do step by step introduction about techniques, supplies and really easy, approachable examples of simple things that will look decent when you try by yourself. Get…
Don’t kid yourself about bootcamps. These intensive trainings last couple of weeks and promise marvels. It’s not a good way to become a software developer. It’s worthwhile experience and a good investment if you want to start, but assuming you can become a “software engineer” or even “software developer” during software bootcamp may end up in a surprise. I…
When you build your software, you don’t have the usual constraints which you have at work: you don’t have a deadline, you don’t have specs, you don’t have customers asking for features, no agile plan with stories, sprints, points and tasks. You’re your own boss. You can do whatever you want. For example: you can write your project in a niche programming language maybe…
After a busy day of debugging you went grocery shopping. After starying for eight hours straighs into the iTerm, being in the avocado section felt like a breeze. And then you enter home. Cooks You enter the kitchen and it’s a mess. You’re scared of putting your bags full of fresh, organic produce. Germs are everywhere, after all, and you know it. The tabletop is sticky. Hard to be…
Design is an overloaded word, but we all get it when we see or experience it. For software design and achieving usability the basics of design are indespensible. Understanding why things are placed the certain way and have certain color is important. Reading about it is great, and I highly encourage you to buy Non-Designers Design Book , but if you prefer to watch something in the moments of…
I don’t remember which audiobook I heard it from, but the author stated we all seek and are directed by four things: status, power, money, and popularity. Working on software is no different: people don’t spend their private time in front of the computer hacking code without a reason. You must like to get critique from people who read your code, since it improves your skills. After you…
Software engineer offline you can be more productive. I argue that being offline actually helps a lot, especially with focus . You may in theory waste your time becuase you’ll reimplement a function, or done things suboptimally, but it’s not that much of a deal. Below I tell you how to give it a try, and I walk you through the tools I use. Why staying offline may help? No distractions…
Joel Spolsky stated that as a software engineer one can have a great workspace experience in the software company. When I first read it, I worked for the hardware company, in fact, and it took me a while to understand what he meant. Let’s say he was 50% right. What I share with you here is my experience is backed by one year of internship at Xilinx in 2011, followed by three year full-time…
Ninety five percent of professional software engineers use Jenkins as a Continuous Integration . The rest are consumers of Travis-Ci , Circle CI and many other hosted CI platforms. None of these platforms are opinionated. They are just a little smarter replacements of cron , allowing you to simply throw many commands into the flow to build your software. We use these tools in a dump way, I argue,…
This books is meant to be a collection of letters from Hedrian to Marcus Aurelius. Great content and excellent research has been done to actually provide enough details about the insights about Hadrian. The structure was so-so, since “letters” are way too long, and in general I’d had a feeling that the story isn’t really going anywhere. The fact that it’s all has been…
You should follow the Single Command Principle of software deployment. A customer takes your software from the repository, looks at the README file and sees a single command. A main entrance to the whole “software”. Stuff is built and starts to just work in five minutes. This saves time and effort. This command should either run your software with safe defaults, most common…
You will learn how to setup SSH VPN with sshuttle quickly here. SSH VPN people say is “poor man’s” VPN , but I view it as a great tool, since you can’t always spin OpenVPN easily. If you have the SSH keys installed on the server, there’s no need for any other configuration. No certificates, no drama. I’m using OSX for the purposes of this article. (Photo by…
IBM was not on the top of my list for doing my entrepreneurial studies, and somehow I learned about this book by accident. Not only was this book great, but it’s also written by Louis Gerstner, who’s an ex-CEO of IBM. Think of it as a first person shooter, where a main guy (you) is the CEO, and problems are the monsters in a game. You should take a look at it, if you ever want to do…
This post is for people who look for ways to spend money on personal growth, as a software engineer. Previously I covered how much one should spend to growth . Here let’s talk about the best resources you can invest in. You should seek for ways of saving your money and after-tax earnings. Before you apply any of the suggestions, remember to ask your school or employer about them. They have a…
Most likely you aren’t a good Open Source contributor. Most people aren’t. Let’s look at it a bit closer. Below you’ll find a scale which will give you the sense of how the community of Open Source is structured. Where do you fall in it? By community you can understand several things, but to simplify things: think of GitHub . Don’t worry too much GitHub is an actual…
This is a live list of movies I enjoyed. They assist me till now. I often think of scenes from some of these titles. They spark my imagination, and bring some smile. Triumph of the Nerds Very interesting documentary on Silicon Valley history. Something Ventured Silicon Valley is made out of a mix of investors and engineers, and this movie shows this real tight collaboration between the two. It has…
There are several competitors for password managers. I use LastPass , because it has an Open Source command line client . This is an officially supported tool, maintained by the LastPass itself. I haven’t audited the code; I have just looked at several .c files, and it seamed decent. Code has been around since 2014, so in the last three years I suspect both good and bad guys had a chance to…
This book is an excellent take on the strategies of great CEOs. I don’t remember how I learned about it, but I believe it was The Snowball . Most of people from this book were fairly unconventional, and against the per-book approach of management. Great part of the book is a breakdown of capital allocation and capital preservation strategies. Author did an excellent role in researching…
Didn’t remember this book whatsoever after several weeks after reading it.
(Photo by Yatesndu Agus Wismoyo via Unsplash ) Imagine we’re starting a software project together this year. It will run in production, and serve a large amount of live customer traffic. Its lifespan may look like this: If this cycle of maintenance is long enough, it can overweight the cost of all previous stages. I do have projects which are considered “finished”: all the…
The role of the software architect is to reject bad code, push back on unnecessary features and prevent the project from accumulating cruft. I use the term “software architect” here to match the professional environment, but it can apply to any independent software developer, including Open Source software engineers writing projects they love and talk about. When you make a change to…
This book is a classic for books about writing software, but in general I found it underwhelming. Java code is verbose by default, with all its public , static , protected even refactored, you end up with a similar level of complexity. That’s the take I had from that book: several examples were indeed refactored and the end code was shown, but I had “meh” feeling about whether it…
The advice you will get here is a true and honest take on how I believe you should start programming computers, and how you can self-educate yourself in a programming craft. I know how to do it because I went through this process by myself and I know exactly where the pain points are. I don’t talk about any specific books, as other people have done it already. I only talk about methodology…
Software engineers can start generating income pretty early on. You don’t need permission from anyone, no certificates, no paperwork, no examination. If you have your debts paid off, this is the moment when you should think of yourself as a single-person company. Why? It’s not because I want you to go and become a freelancer and be on your own, but becuase it’s easier to…
Probably one of the best books on language, writing and readability in general. It’s very good take on phrasing readable sentences, keeping language clear and concise. The key take away were the results of the readability studies Flesch did in early XXIth century. He found certain relationships with age and education and its impact on text readability. Before I read this, I didn’t know…
It’s simpler than anything else around. I know. It’s counterintuitive. All the nice tools and integrated environments for writing code looks slick. You may even see other people using them in the train to work. You look over their shoulder and it doesn’t look that hard. But it is. So stay with me hear and listen. The idea might be counterintuitive, but if you go with it, I think…
David Ogilvy and many other authors of copy-written ads mentioned Claude C. Hopkins was their hero, and that his book is a mandatory reading. You should at least look at it, if you want to get a full experience for your advertising and marketing education. The myths of advertising being “creative” are debunked here. The advertising from a purely scientific format is shown. Ads are treated like…
If you want to make software products, you must know design. Even when I worked for the hardware company, my software was used by humans, and they object if what you make sucks. I’ve made a script used by many engineers for result reporting. And the output was shared in the web, PDF and printed form. For stuff like this you must know design, otherwise you’ll fail miserably. This is one…
Even if you don’t like Windows, some tools there are great. One of them is WinAmp , probably the best audio player around. (do you know a replacement for OSX? Let me know!) Another is Total Commander –the 2 pane file commander. Total Commander can do anything you can think of for file management. Its UI was like Norton Commander ’s: the “blue background” file manager…
This is a biography of David Ogilvy of Ogilvy and Mather. You will get a behind the scenes look at the advertising agency and business, but you won’t get much of advises about advertising of how to write a good body copy. For this, look at other books by the same author. I decided to read this book, since I was intrigued by Ogilvy, since it appears he did his homework on measuring the…
I would argue that without reading, you’re wasting a lot of time. “Good people borrow, and great steal”. I know few software engineers, who don’t read and yet still write amazing software. But there are very few of them. I bet you’re not one of them, actually. And most of their time, they do waste some time too. Very few of us solve unique problems. You’re…
So you have built something and you want to sell it. Direct approach probably works best, and you can blast the information about your product to the potential prospects through the e-mail. But you don’t know how? You’ve never done it, right? You just keep making websites and software, and you’re good at it, but somehow your stuff isn’t gaining traction? Do you make it a…
You created a blog, but it sucks? It has beautiful minimized HTML, great JavaScript and CSS and renders flawlessly on iOS 6. The problem is that nobody but you is accessing your blog? Exactly. I made this blog in 2012, but didn’t really think about it much. I restarted the efforts in 2015 and 2016, but had moderate success (hundreds visitors “spiking” when I published something,…