About

Hello!

I'm David Gustys. You have reached my personal website.

I write about my interests, experience in big tech companies and startups, software engineering, my understanding of leadership, and sometimes just philosophical ramblings. I create and collect quotes that resonate with me.

All timeless posts are tagged as Evergreen, for your convenience.

Short Plug

I have over a decade of experience in navigating the tech landscape, from hands-on software engineering to leading dynamic teams on impactful projects.

I have built high-traffic backend services that handle millions of requests per day, as well as scalable user-facing web and mobile applications with complex states that offer seamless user experiences.

While I love trying out new and experimental technologies, I have found that battle-tested solutions with "boring" technologies are usually the best and most reliable for production systems.

About me

I'm a son, husband, father of two, and a computer, gadget, and hardware nerd, so it's no surprise that I'm a software engineer professionally. With 15+ years in software development, I've worked in web, system, mobile app development, and big-data companies of all sizes - from startups to Fortune 100. Currently, I'm fascinated by LLMs (and AI generally), and biotech (CRISPR).

In my leisure time, I enjoy reading informative books, watching sci-fi and fantasy anime, movies, and TV shows, and playing games like Red Alert, Diablo, and Fallout. My busy life as a father and learning-driven engineer means I must be very protective and selective of my time.

I'm linguistically skilled in Lithuanian, English, German, and Russian, and I have lived in the UK and Germany before returning to Lithuania.

I'm also a former competitive sports player in basketball and tennis.

I'm curious and open-minded; I believe that challenging ideas and the status quo can lead to interesting findings that, more often than not, are beneficial; thus, I usually like to play devil's advocate professionally and personally.

Work values

I am a builder with an intrapreneurial approach with a strong bias for action and example. I value ownership, trust, and great communication in teams. I think the best teams listen closely to their customers and build things people want. While tech is great, I firmly believe that humans are the most essential part of any organization. Empathy, trust, and communication are important skills for any team to succeed. I love sharing my knowledge and experience with others, and I always seek to learn from others.

What's my focus right now?

I have always been interested in big-data tech - from setting up data pipelines with Handoop, Kafka, and Spark( + Pandas for data normalization) for my clients to simple website scrapping to get the latest crypto tickers.

I have also kept an eye on AI development, especially what Google's Deepmind company was doing. So when the recent LLM (/ Transformers) "revolution" came, I jumped on the bandwagon.

Being of engineer mindset - I wish not only to be a user of big LLMs (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) but also to know how to train them, how to adjust the weights, what the best approach to knowledge extension is it RAG, DPR, how can multi-modal be used for synergies, or maybe how to add interactive learning for continues improvement.

So that's what I'm focusing on right now. I'm using my big-data experience with the recent learnings of LLMs to train tiny models hands-on. My current dabblings are giving me more questions than "aha" moments, though they also gave me some Big productization Ideas. These multi-models will shape the future of technology; in the next decade, we will see it integrated everywhere, i.e., in your fridge. This technology is genuinely exciting, and I want to be in the center of it.