Intern Lore

Maciej is an intern who uses his young age and abilities to achive his life goals. In this section we will talk a little bit more about him and his life.

Hello Riot Games! I would like to introduce myself and convince you to choose me for your Summer Internship 2013. On this website you will find all necessary information about me and my life, including my interest, previous experience and future plans. I encourage you to read it all - I know the amount of scrolling might be absorbing for you, but I am sure that at the end of your journey you will feel that it was worth it. If you would have an official CV of mine, here is a link, but I would love to convince you to use this website that I've made especially for this recruit process.

Abilities

Intern Abilities

• 
  Eager To Learn (passive)
  After using each ability, Maciej gains another knowledge about it that makes him better in certain ability.
• 
  Work Harder
  Maciej works hard, motivating nearby allies to do the same.
• 
  Photo Rainbow
  Maciej makes a tauting photography of his enemy, forcing him to become an ally.
• 
  Golden Voice
  Maciej uses his voice to send a message to all nerby allies and enemies, teaching them how to end their conflicts.
• 
  Code Madness (Ultimate)
  Upon activating this ability, Maciej is focusing on his side projects, causing him to be more effective.

Intern Spells

• 
  Play The League
  While having a little bit of free time, Maciej enjoys playing League Of Legends to have fun.
• 
  Get The Visa
  After using this spell, Maciej gets an J-1 Visa, that allows him to travel to USA without any problems.

Languages

• English - fluent
• German - basic
• Polish - native

Education

• 2011 - current: University of Gdańsk, ICT
• 2007 - 2011: School Complex of Communication, Technical School

Certificates

• National Certificate of Competences, technician, IT
• European Computer Driving Licence
• App Camp Polska by Kainos – Certificate of participating

Basic Info

Learn something about me here.

About me

I am goal-oriented leader since the 3rd grade of primary school. For me, gathering information and learning new technologies is like breathing. I have always wanted to be on the backstage, it was and it is still really interesting to me. I am always focused on a good team workflow and good relation with my clients, especially with players across the Europe and globe. Every time when I can – I share my experience and knowledge. Good human relations are a key for me and every new problem to solve is a new lesson for me on how to work better. I will never stop to gain new experiences. It is a way to meet new opportunities and make new friends. I work hard everyday to reach my goals, and I will never say no, when somebody needs a help from me. I consider myself a open-minded person with a lot of respect and many goals to achieve in life. I do not like to be bored, so I am challenging myself with new experiences everyday. I am not an ordinary IT guy that knows how to develop certain application. I consider myself as business-programmer that connects two worlds to reach my own objectives. I love to meet new people and know how they live their lives, especially if they are outside of my country. I love to speak in English as much as possible.

I live in one of the biggest cities in Poland, Gdańsk. You may recognize my city from Solidarity Movement or more recent Euro 2012 ;) I am a strong supporter of local patriotism (you can read about it in last section). My love is filled with love to old photographs about my local area and local hockey team called Stoczniowiec Gdańsk which has been disbanded recently - but I hope they will get better next years.

How can I contribute into Riot Games?

I can give you my person, my skills and abilities, my own commitment, ideas and my passion. I really think that I can contribute in many ways, from development to business, gathering it all up for a better good. I would love to do this, because I see my work in the next couple of years that may be used by millions of players across the globe - that would be a dream come true for me.

Why Riot Games?

That would be a loooong story. Somewhere in the middle of first season in League of Legends when my friend invited me to check it out. I quickly fell in love with this game. It gives me nearly everything what I want the game to be.

After some time and quite stories (see Gamer section) I decided to ask Riot Games if you guys would hire me. But after a year from then I now understand why you didn’t even replied me back.

But I haven’t said to myself: “ok, nevermind”. I worked hard for the past year to try to enroll for your internship. I would love to check out one of the most powerful combinations in the modern world - work in a entertainment company. Work hard and play, that’s a combination I’d like to try out. You are starting to become next global company, like Google, Apple, Microsoft or Blizzard - I would kill for opportunity to be there and check how it works from the other side (see the organiser section) because you simply fulfill every requirement that I want company to have. Additionally, one of the biggest dreams of my life currently is to visit US. Not only as a tourist, but to live at least 2 weeks there, meet some people, get my own view about it and fulfill my american-dream ;)

What about my visa?

Well, Visa isn’t a problem right now - I will be able to get a J-1 Visa for working students as soon as you will tell me that I need it.

IT Guy

Meet a geek.

Everyone should know how to code.

I am an IT guys with a lot of experience - according to my age of course ;) Basically you can say that I was borned with this interest, because I do have somewhere in my family albums that I was carrying an old keyboard when I was just few weeks old.

2004 - it all started there.

Back in 2004, I’ve started to use Internet for more that just LAN Counter-Strike games from my district. I started to learn how to create my first websites and programmes - just after few weeks later I created few sites for my clan, my scouts team and so on and so forth. But it wasn’t all I’ve done. Photoshop became my friend as well as some tutorial websites like graffik or deviantART where I’ve learn how to make good graphics. It all helped me alot in my future projects.

2005 - cs-hacked.pl

Somewhere in 2005 I’ve become a moderator of a very known in that time forums, called cs-hacked.pl where - woopsie - many Counter-Strike cheats and other “helpers” may be found. I’ve never used one. My goal that I wanted to achieve was to get some experience in communication area. I didn’t treated my users like other guys, oh no. I treated them with respect. And it all came out good for me - I’ve quickly became a site junior admin, and then a manager-administrator - only owner of the site was higher than me at that time. At this point, CSH already got around 70000 users. This story could be longer and I will not go much into details why this site doesn’t exist anymore, but I got my lesson.

2006 - fotokolej.pl

In the middle of 2006, I’ve created a small website that became my very own child. It was and it still is a train photogallery fotokolej.pl, used by many passionates from all over the country. This is where my IT intrest got bigger and bigger, that later on became my work and way of life.

2007 - te-es.pl

Going back with memories to 2007, I’ve joined teamspeak.com.pl team, that moved to a new place named te-es.pl in 2009. As always - starting as a rookie, ending with being professional in this area. Currently, after short break we are getting back on our tracks, but before some mistakes we were in a top 10 public TeamSpeak 3 servers in the world, according to GameTracker. I was and I am (as a co-owner of the organization) responsible for its public image as Community Manager as well as website, forums and our machine that runs all public servers across our organization. To be perfectly honest, I think this organisation for the past couple of years gave me more that I possibly imagine - besides IT stuff that I’ve learned, that included Linux administration, voice servers administration we have launched our Minecraft Sponsoring Programme, that was based on my idea and my software behind it. As an non-profit organisation (due to TeamSpeak 3 licences) we are not able to collect any money, even from sponsors. So we had no money but we needed an administration panel for Minecraft Servers.

Minecraft Control Panel

I’ve decided to face this challenge and I’ve won. After 2 months we got a fully operative and functional Minecraft Control Panel, that allowed my administrators to create accounts and servers and provided basic control to our sponsoring users like start/stop/restart/kill, configuration files editing and so on and so forth. My script, written on top of CodeIgniter PHP Framework was connecting with our machine using SSH protocol. I’ve even contributed to open-source php library - my case helped author to find a bug about ssh connection. Even now, when we not using it - I am thinking about adding new features and publishing it on GitHub in a open-source repository.

There where many other things that I’ve needed to do in Te-Es.pl like for instance: client database panel, forums-website integration, website complete redesign and many many more. This was one of the things that helped me to get my current job.

National certificate

Somewhere in the middle of all this, I’ve finished my technical high-school and got my national certificate that confirms that I am a computer technician. I am very proud of it - because it wasn’t easy to get it - you needed to get at least 75% on practical exam to pass.

Last years

Now and beyond

All my experience led me to my current situation. I am employed for more than one year now in online payments processing company called PayLane as a Web Application Developer. I am responsible for running both frontend and backend services with my colleagues. It includes adding new languages to our administration panels, maintain and refactor Invoices and Statements generation classes, getting in to Polish banks with cURL scripts, parsing long regular expressions that we receive from our partners, contribute to our API and help my other friends from my department. We are still a small startup, but if you visit paylane.com, I think you will get an idea how much I need to have on my head everyday. One of the best things about this job for me is that we are PCI-DSS Level 1 Compliant - that means I deal with highest level of software security everyday. And this is one of my private interests, so I enjoy it as much as I enjoy games. I’ve learned more than I possibly imagine in my work. From many IT stuff, through payment processing specifics to dealing with customers from any country you can imagine to give them “5 star customer service” and solve their problems with a blink of an eye.

There is a short list about what I’ve done so far in my projects that I haven’t mentioned yet (because they are not developed any more or are just too small to talk about them) and what I do want achieve in the future:

As you can see (or read) there are many things that I’ve done so far - there are more, but I would like you to check out other sections too ;) If you want to ask me any questions about my projects, or want me to be more specific on any of them, just ask me out - I will be more than happy to talk about it.

Mobile World

Think mobile, breath mobile.

Mobile is the future.

I wanted to make it a separate section, because it is my separate world right now. In 2011 a company named Kainos came to my university during my junior-year and made a short presentation about developing applications to iOS (iPhones, iPads). They created a student programme, called AppCamp. What was it? You needed to have an idea for an application that is related to medicine and send your resume. Then they selected 18 people group from over 200 applicants - I was one of this 18. We have learned everything that they had about iOS programming in just 6 full weekends. At the end, it all came to some presentations about our ideas, that was similar to Dragons Den. I didn’t passed through (If I would I could get my own MacBook Pro and an iPod touch to develop my own application and push it to App Store) but this programme gave me more that this.

Next goal

It gave my my new passion that is stronger that everything else. Mobile.
After AppCamp, I’ve became obsessed with mobile stuff. Thanks to post-program certificate, I was able to find my job at PayLane and get some money. I decided to get earn money for my own MacBook Pro and an iPhone + Apple Developers Account. It took me 10 months to get there, but it was worth it. During that time I learned so much about it. How it all works, what is most important, what are key differences between two platforms, how to attract mobile customer, what he needs, how to sell an application and and how to write one. I’ve been at 2 conferences right now, with the next one just in April that will take place in Krakow, Poland.

First serious application

I’ve already proven that I will be good at it - in June last year I was approached by my boss - he needed an mobile payment application for our company. I was more than happy to help. After 2 weeks I’ve got everything working. Application was based on making photo of a credit card and getting it’s number out of it and then using this credentials to process mobile payments through our payment application. It was a huge success - during one of our company events it raised a lot of Euros for us (ask me for details) . Not bad, huh?

New direction

What I am now heading on is to become a real mobile developer that is focused on deploying iPhone and iPad applications using native controllers or JavaScript libraries with all important things that needs to apply - usability, user experience, great design and great ideas.

A good piece of advice

I love to give people advices about their websites that should be optimized for mobile, how they need to change they thinking to “mobile first”. With my future project that will be a mobile blog I would like to spread word about mobile in my country - sort of mobile evangelist. I do consider myself to be able to make our market one of the best in the world.

Additionally, I do have my own ideas for applications that I will publish in the App Store in near future, including LCS Mobile App ;) Maybe we can work on it together?

Scouting

Are you prepared to live your life?

Scouting is the best thing, ever.

Scouting is one of the things that made me who I am now. When I officially joined my team back in 2003, I didn’t yet know that it would be the most important journey in my life so far. Scouting taught me how to live with certain rules. How to respect people, how to become better person and how to overcome my weaknesses.

I’ve come a long way from being just a regular member of our team to one of it’s leaders and official instructor right now. We are not usual team, because we utilize sailing abilities in our normal program. I’ve taught many children how to do the same with my life as I do. I love it - I couldn’t now quit and say that that part of my life doesn’t exist. Even if I do not have the same amount of time that I’d like to have for scouting right now, I still try to live my life within it’s 10 base rules and laws. Some people from scouting are saying now that I’ve become some kind of authority for younger members of our community and I am feeling it. It is big opportunity to take, especially nowadays where Social Media is so much popularized. One of my goals right now is to teach other instructors to use power of this tool, but without forgetting that it may also destroy they authority just with one picture.

Actual work as a scout

Additionally currently I am a member of regional Promotion, Marketing and Information Committee that is responsible for Promotion and Marketing actions across our state- that’s around 5000 scouts, from 7y old children (and their parents!) to older instructors. We are voice of north, if you want to have a fancy name. I am responsible for facebook page as well as our website gdańska.zhp.pl

Regatta

In the past I was responsible for co-organizing many scouts events for our state, like regional swimming competition or something called “Spartakiada” that is a water scouts national competition. Every September we are gathering in Puck, Poland where we compete in different categories, from quizzes to yacht regatta. Last year there were more than 300 attendants that were competing in 4 different age categories.

Coordination

Instructor Trial was one of those things that only got me better at some things. For example I needed to gather 3 new sponsors for Scouting Events, overcome my weakness and donor blood once or get advanced First Aid training that last for 16 hours. I do have a large documentation about it, including all challenges that I needed to pass, photos and many more. During the trial I’ve also made a Scouting Managment System for my team - you can read about it in IT Guy section.

I think that scouting made me a better person and prepared me for my future work and life. It also prepared me for being more organized person that can handle more things that anyone else in my age.

Photography

Please stand still and smile ;)

Let me show you my point of view.

With my photography I want to show other people how I see our world. I also want to teach people how to make better photos (maybe I can organize a workshops when I will be in Santa Monica?) and how to avoid beginner mistakes. But most important - I want it to be my “backup plan” if being an IT Guy or other things that I have doesn’t work for me.

Organiser

Good organisation is a key to victory.

Be a good, open-minded leader.

Being a good leader and organiser is one of the most important things in my life. Since I grew up a little and realized I can be good at it I’ve made many things possible for me and my friends.

I love being an organiser. It give me more and more power to become a better person. I am not afraid of public appearances since I’ve been an announcer and master of master of ceremonies many times. I am known to reach my goals, no matter how big or complicated they are.

Besides things that I’ve mentioned in Scouting section - like Spartakiada or Swimming Competition I do have many other events that I’ve organised myself or been an co-organiser.

Expo

Teach others

Another of my experience in that field came from my high school, where I was leading workshops for junior years about LEGO Mindstorm robotics. It wasn’t only school workshops - when I was a part of school exchange program in 2007,2008 I’ve leaded robotic workshops both in Poland as well in Holland and France in English language.

Go global

Be a good leader

I personally think that all things that I’ve wrote so far can describe me about good leader - not that I can personally announce myself to be one, but my study shows that other people see me as one. Additionally I’ve been studying good and bad leader examples when I was participating in Scouting Instructor workshops that was necessary to pass the trial.

Preserve what you have

Back to te-es.pl that I’ve mentioned in IT Guy section, I think that most part of I’ve learned about being a good organiser comes from there - you need to be a good leader to preserve your staff that will do some things for free, keep your sponsors happy and constantly look after servers and users needs. I am convinced that this kind of approach led us to top 10 last year.

What about future?

One of my dreams right now and things that I will organise in the future is IEM in Gdańsk. I am waiting for a good opportunity right now, but I’ve been developing this idea in my head for at least a year, when I saw IEM Cologne. And now, after first IEM in Poland (Katowice) that was a huge success - i think it is time to give a chance to our city, especially when we have a lot of advantages on our side. I will be very pleased if I could lead this project to make it happen and I am convinced that I can realize this with a little bit of help.

The Gamer

E-Sport is the future of games.

Never forget that you are a gamer.

Although I am an IT guy that works a lot, I always was a gamer too. Not that hardore as many of my friends - I’ve chosen to learn many other things than play games for hours - but I enjoy it as much as I enjoy developing new applications on iPhone.

I think my first contact with PC games was when I was around ten years old - my mother was working from home (she is an accountant) - there was a game called Jazz Jackrabbit 2 that I loved to play. During some of my early vacations I met guy that changed my life so much - and I am very grateful that he showed me Counter Strike ;) From that time and time when I got my ADSL connection in home I felt in love with that game and many more. But I am not a normal type of a player. According to gamification player types I am some kind of analyzer guy who love to live with the community and explore the world, not only compete with others. I loved to give some people advices, make game atmosphere better and better. I’ve played Counter-Strike from 1.3 to 1.6 and above or many years. I could list all the games that I’ve played so far but I think just another three will give you what I wanted to show you.

Always wanted to be a Jedi

Fight bad guys

The next one was Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, free game developed by Splash Damage and published by Activision. I’ve spent so many hours on that game... As always - I’ve focused more on community side of it. Clans, open communities, forums, mods - everything was so fascinating that it quickly became my passion. I’ve wanted to become part of a big community and participate. I’ve made it many times and I am very happy about my experience. Games isn’t only games. Nowadays they are more than that - they can teach, they can make you happy and of course then can harm you, too.

I believe we all love the last one - League of Legends.

I love the League. I’ve been playing it since middle of first season, and I am very happy that I’ve chosen to stay and play. Although LoL have some issues like trolls, unskilled players, unbalanced champions i still love it. Why? It all comes to teamplay and community. I believe teamplay is a key to every victory. If you can lead your team to victory with great positioning and teamplay it is one of the great feelings for playing man and women across the globe. I think together we can change people thinking about solo queue, force them to think about their behaviour in-game and isolate them from normal, casual players for good if they don’t agree to accept our rules. I think that new Leagues System and Honor System is a one step further to achieve this community goal. Keeping a positive attitude in-game is another one and I always want to preserve it, even if someone is just being selfish and rude - because I belive that this is another of problems that League need to face, I will become very first ambassador of Positive Attitude.

Summoner

I’d like now to talk a little about my summoner - ferusinfo. I prefer to play mid lane, but I’ve also mained supports in Season 2. I’ve had a short episode of being a jungler, but I could not stand pressure that is against him in every game. My favorite champions are (in correct order): Lux, Cassiopeia, Diana, Talon and Kha’Zix. Personally I think that AD Casters are something that will change playstyle of many players in the League - including myself.

International gaming

For the past 2 seasons I’ve already been in at least three semi-professional teams. In the first one we were just group of friends with aspirations - it didn’t worked because we had no proper leadership in game - our self-named captain had no sense of positioning and how to be a good team leader so we needed to disband after couple of Go4LoL cups and nearly 1 year of playing together.

Struggle

Other two teams were just very short adventures with international gaming. In the first one there were 2 Swedish, 2 Danish guys and me but we could not agree on some terms like having pure fun from playing even if we lose so we disbanded. But it wasn’t enough for me. I wanted to experience international teamplay. Shortly after first team I’ve found team that we called So Bad Yet So Good. We were playing with each other for almost a month. It was great and I was seriously considering (and I am still thinking about it) to go professional and sacrifice some of my precious time for real trainings to become a professional gamer. But yet another there were no proper leadership and our leader attitude was just wrong, thats all. We disbanded after 4 days of struggling with each other, sending long emails (that I can provide to you as an example if you ask me) - we all wanted our team to preserve - but team leader already made a decision.

New approach

Now I know that I will try to make my own team, where I will try to show others how to be a good, positive thinking and open-minded leader. Maybe I should create website with advices for beginning leaders in League? Hmm... lets add this to my future projects.

Other Intrests

There is more than you think.

But this isn’t all i wanted to show.

In this last section (I really hope that I've convinced you already to choose me for your intern) there are some of my interest that aren’t connected to any of sections above, but I wanted you to know about them to know me still a little bit better. There are even more than I would like to describe here, like collecting postards etc. - but I think these below are worth to read.

The Golden Voice

I ain't got me ground legs yet, landlubber!

My city

Gdańsk is very important for me - I am his strong local supporter. I’ve been fighting with it’s vice-president about his law on public parking spaces and thanks to my social buzz and activity I’ve been able to force him to resign from that idea in my own district and move it to more place where it is more needed. I’ve also been an announcer for local district picnic - I needed to talk to more than 500 people at once - It wasn’t especially hard for me, because I love public appearances ;)

Social Media is the king

Last, but not least I would love to talk a little bit about my new love, that I consider to be Social Media of all kind. As an IT guy I love to be surrounded with new technologies. But what Social Media done to our actual world is simply amazing! I am convinced that in the future world this kind of communication will destroy television and press paper - we will get our news from whenever we want. It already was a big success for me - after my activity in social media on Mobile Mobile Conference that will take in April, organisers of it contacted me and offered nearly 70% promo discount for my contribution into social media buzz! For “starving student” like me it is a great opportunity to meet and I will sure use it.

FACEBOOK

TWITTER

INSTAGRAM

LINKEDIN

In this part, you say "yes".

This is last section of our journey this time, but it isn’t over yet. Now is time for your story - this one should be called “Approval Answer” ;)