About

I’m Attila Györffy, a product engineer with two decades of experience building systems across fintech, infrastructure, and developer platforms. I work primarily with Ruby, Rails, and Go, and I’m currently deepening my work in Rust.

Most of my career has been about stepping into complex systems and understanding them before changing anything. The costliest mistakes I’ve seen came from acting with an incomplete map — not from lack of talent. I care about observability, reliability, and mentoring teams to build codebases that get better over years, not just sprints.

The Scout Mindset

My approach draws inspiration from Julia Galef’s scout mindset: seeking an accurate map of reality, even when it’s inconvenient. Applied to software, it means:

• Understand before acting. Know the real constraints, failure modes, and incentives — not just the surface behavior.
• Think from first principles. Reason from the fundamentals of the problem, not from patterns inherited without question.
• Stay curious across disciplines. Good engineering touches product, architecture, human systems, and sometimes even society.
• Be willing to update your map. Getting something wrong isn’t a failure; it’s data.

Beyond Work

Outside of work, I maintain a homelab running TrueNAS, OPNsense, Prometheus, and Grafana — because apparently monitoring things is a hobby now. I build audio-focused applications for local music collections, explore self-hosting and open protocols, and occasionally take photographs.

This site collects field notes from all of it — technical insights, engineering patterns, and reflections on how technology shapes the way we work and live. You can also find my full professional background on my CV.