Piotr Trębacz
Devops Leader | Agile & Strategic Corporate Rebel | Good Practices Hoarder | Tabletop Tactician
Warsaw, Poland
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Piotr is a Senior DevOps Manager in the casino industry, championing North Star thinking, Continuous Improvement, and Measurable Outcomes - to transform troubled software and processes into modern standards. He's specialty is combining hard technical skills and soft leadership pragmatism with high agency & Over the past 13 years, he's led $1M+ digital transformations, scaled platform engineering across hundreds of developers and thousands of microservices on AWS/GCP at a time across Air Defense, Gaming, Banking, Logistics, Fuel, Mars Rovers and Gambling & Industry 4.0.
He achieved that with Second Brain of almost 7000 hand-gardened notes bringing unconventional outside-in perspective like his maverick mantras: "Culture Eats Strategy," "Velocity Wins," and "Automation Is Oxygen".
Off-duty, find him in Hawaiian shirts, Game Mastering RPGs, tinkering in his rapid prototyping workshop, or optimizing board game tactics with probability.
Trusted as Code Europe Program Committee member, Ex-GDG Organizer, and speaker, he happily mentors younger experts sharing battle-tested insights.
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Lead your Software Teams like a Dungeon Master
New tech leads often fall into the same traps as bad Dungeon Masters: over-preparing for scenarios that never happen, trying to control the story instead of collaborating on outcomes, and failing to give each team member their heroic moments. The result? "Murder hobos" who don't follow process, rockstar developers who damage team dynamics, and talented engineers who leave because they're stuck in uninspiring stories.
Drawing from battle-tested concepts in Radical Candor, Corporate Rebels, and other leadership frameworks, this talk reveals how the best practices from running successful RPG campaigns translate directly into proven management techniques.
You'll discover practical strategies for turning difficult team conversations into collaborative problem-solving sessions, why effective leaders focus on getting things right, and how to give every team member meaningful ownership while preventing leadership burnout.
Perfect for new tech leads ready to move beyond command-and-control leadership, plus any tabletop gaming enthusiasts who want to level up their campaign management skills!
Presented on Project to Product Summit 2024
Terraform, day 1001
Have you ever seen a Terraform/OpenTofu tutorial from a perspective of full cloud migration running longer than 5 minutes? Most of them leave you after setting a VPC, VMs and some supplementary resources in the MVP state.
Then You are told to implement that technology in your complex production environment and ... there are enough 2nd day mistakes to conclude that IaaC sucks? Or maybe your company did click-ops till it becomes unmanageable, then fail to implement IaaC as an afterthought?
Well, let me help you understand how to write code for scalable infrastructure that itself also scales. Without costly TACOS platforms that vendor lock you, just your favorite tools.
Let's fast track from typical Terraform Tutorial Repo to Enterprise Level Terraform with good practices gathered by someone who designed and fixed IaaC Architectures for companies ranging scale ups to big corporations!
Presented on DevOps Days Warsaw 2024
Presented of 4Dev Katowice 2025
The Anti-AI Playbook & Building the One Asset AI Can't Generate: Your Judgement.
AI Is Cheap. Your Judgment Isn't. While using AI daily and seeing a lot of "AI-native" engineering candidates, I see that it doesn't create competitive advantage. Your accumulated experience does. AI just amplifies it... if you've actually captured it.
LLMs have made knowledge abundant and execution cheap. The scarce resource isn't information anymore: it's original thinking. The future belongs to experts who monetize a personal "Second Brain": a curated repository of their thoughts, experiences, frameworks, and solutions. Call it your personal grimoire, in a world where AI itself is a commodity.
I'll share what 3+ years of building a grimoire of 6,600+ interconnected notes taught me. You'll see how low-friction capture, opinionated frameworks, and AI turn scattered notes into reusable assets for engineering, leadership, hiring, and decision-making. Everyone has access to the same models now, so your judgment - and the notes that encode it - becomes the career-defining asset that no one else can replicate.
This talk is for professionals tired of losing critical insights, ready for a systematic way to make experience accumulate and compound instead of evaporating. It's a practical solution to the Lost Knowledge Problem: distilling years of hard-won expertise into reusable assets, while cutting the friction of starting and maintaining a Second Brain.
Different version was presented on Devfest Warsaw 2025
Escaping the DevOps Hamster Wheel of Busywork
You automate away millions in costs, yet you remain invisible. You’re the first call when things break, but the last person with the authority to truly fix them. This isn't the strategic role you signed up for - it's a hamster wheel of thankless tasks and shifting priorities, and it's time to get off.
This session delivers a practical framework to break the cycle. No vague advice. Just battle-tested tactics to reclaim your focus and prove your value.
You will learn how to:
- Master the art of strategic pushback. Learn to kill low-impact fire-drills and reframe urgent demands by asking one simple question: "To do this, what gets de-prioritized?"
- Make Your Value Impossible to Ignore with the business outcomes that leaders notice and reward, shifting the narrative from a reactive cost center to an indispensable strategic partner.
- Navigate the Real Power Structure by learn to see the corporate machine as it truly operates, not as it's described. Use this insight to bend the unwritten rules and bypass bureaucracy, becoming an effective rebel whose impact is undeniable.
Available for premiere at your conference!
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