Interview - Grzegorz Orczykowski

Name
Grzegorz Orczykowski (@Grzesiek2010)

Photo

Location: Where do you live? Where do you work?
I live and work in Gdańsk, Poland. It’s by the Baltic sea where I moved over 3 years ago in order to work as a software engineer. Prior to moving here, I spent all my life in a small Polish village Starzykowo which I always like to go back to and visit my family.

Tell us a fun fact or story about yourself!
As a community member and a developer, I love tracking statistics and seeing that there are more and more devices with ODK Collect installed. It was over 70 thousand when I first joined the project a year and a half ago and now it’s almost 170 thousand!

As for my private life, I’m getting married in November (this year) so I love counting down the days left.

How did you first find out about ODK?
The first job I have worked on as an Android developer was TaroWorks which is based on ODK Collect and then I found out that such an open source project exists.

What are you using ODK for?
I’m not an ODK user, I work on this project to improve it. Sometimes I support users on the forum. So I could say that I’m implementing new features to ODK Collect, I’m testing the app but not using as an average user (yet :slight_smile:)

What’s your favorite ODK feature?
It’s difficult to answer this question since I work on this project as a developer (and therefore I’m biased), so probably I would say that the entire ODK Collect is the best feature or just choose one thing I have implemented… so maybe I’ll go for the possibility to create forms in a spreadsheet.

How did you get so involved in the community? What keeps you coming back & staying involved?
Working on ODK Collect I noticed that my knowledge is enough to help other people. I started answering questions on the forum and then I noticed another interesting fact that it’s a good way to learn about the project and get to know what real users exactly need. Now I try to spend some time every day on the forum helping other people.

What has been the greatest challenge for you in learning about ODK? (Either the software, the community or both!)
As I said I’m not a user of ODK so the greatest challenge for me is understanding what real users really need and which parts of the project we should improve.

Let’s talk about goals: Do you have any ODK-related goals for yourself, your organization, or the overall ODK community?
I would like the community to keep growing and ODK Collect to keep improving. That’s my goal.

What advice would you give someone who’s just learned about ODK and is considering getting involved?
It depends on whether it’s a developer or a non-technical user. Generally, my advice would be “Don’t hesitate to ask”. You can ask on the forum/slack, we always try to help.

Github ID: grzesiek2010
LinkedIn: Grzegorz Orczykowski

10 Likes

Quick correction, @Grzesiek2010, since you did the interview, it looks like we are up to 182,000 active installs on the Play Store. :chart_with_upwards_trend:

3 Likes

Yes, it's growing and growing!

You know, it would be really cool if we could have a live 'ticker' in the Forum showing number of installs! :slight_smile:

Wow, when you said 'small' you weren't kidding! :slightly_smiling_face:

Hahahaha... :grinning:

yes really small, less than 200 people I guess when I was a child.

I think I'm the only developer in the history of that village :sunglasses:

4 Likes

if you dont mind me asking, which of the 10 houses is yours? :slight_smile:

Not visible there. You would need to go that road north-east and it should be the first one on the left.

map duly corrected... :wink:

1 Like

Yes, now it is correct.