rethink

stanisław sokołowski

Connecting the Dots:
A Retrospective of Fortunate Handshakes

AI generalist

^{(or so it seems)}

They say every journey begins with a first step. For me, it has always been a first handshake.

One turned me from a developer into a product thinker; another showed me that managing an IT company required me to unlearn everything I used to do when running a team of designers. Somewhere in between all these handshakes, I realised my actual skill wasn’t any single technology — it was translating between the languages of engineers, designers, and business people who think they’re saying the same thing but aren’t. Now, with AI turning conversations into prototyping workshops, the bottleneck isn’t building anymore — it’s knowing what to build, what tools and who to build it with.

track
record

2005 - 2010

Freelance graphic designer / front-end dev

Album covers and club posters in Kraków, then websites in Flash and JavaScript when clients started needing those. Started as visual work, ended up more interested in how interfaces actually worked than how they looked. Good timing, since Flash didn’t survive much longer.

2010 - 2015

UX / UI Department Lead

Ran a design team at TT MS / Transition Technologies. Built interfaces for Schneider, Areva, PGNiG, Audi, Airbus, Roche — enterprises where “move fast and break things” wasn’t an option. Learned how to hire talents, and manage designers and UX researchers who were better at their jobs than me.

2013 - 2023

Chief Designer

A side project that became a company. Led design at Moiseum for museums and cultural institutions. Built mobile apps and websites, including Daily Art (still live, still teaching people about art history one painting at a time), apps for the Warsaw Uprising Museum, and interactive exhibits for the Museum of the City of Lodz. Learned that good museum UX means staying invisible.

2015 - 2021

Game designer

Nano Titans – three people, no office, no budget, some talent, unreasonable enthusiasm. Built casual games: Nerd Hero, Snake3K, a few white-label titles for Big Fish and Cartoon Network. Our biggest project was never shipped because we learned the hard way that not every idea survives contact with actual players. Ran for almost six years, which in indie game terms is either impressive or stubborn.

2022 - 2025

Partner,
Head of Product Design

Partner and Head of Product Design at Boring Owl, a 20-person software development company. The role was less “Head of Product Design” and more “whatever needs doing”—ran 3-day UX workshops for big-budget projects, managed design and dev teams, automated internal chaos. Spent most of my time keeping clients, designers, and developers speaking the same language: turning client ideas into scopes, scopes into designs, designs into working software.

2020 - now

Founder,
rewire.studio

A collective that rewires itself for each project—different designers, developers, specialists depending on what needs building. Research, strategy, marketing, design, low-code/no-code/vibe-code, automation. Turns out the best team structure is no fixed structure: collaborate with the right people for the problem, then reconfigure for the next one. Connect the dots.

rework

selected work

Some projects from over the years. The ones that either worked well, taught me something useful, or at least make for decent portfolio pieces.

Click/tap to open

websites

^{UX / UI / DEV}

Foundations For Ukraine

Wozownia Bar

Castellani Shop

Fundacja im. Romana Czerneckiego

Stypendium Horyzonty

apps

^{UX / UI}

DailyArt (2013-2023)

varia

^{IDENTITY / DESIGN / GEN AI}

Miscellaneous client work in branding, graphics, and generative AI.
Not everything needs a link.

_{[some videos have sound. One contains explicit language]}

rewire

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untangling the web, rewiring workflows, connecting AI dots

The most recent handshakes have been with AI (or rather AI APIs 🥁), generative visuals, rapid prototyping, vibe coding, teaching others. The work is the same as it’s always been — bridging the gap between creative vision and technical reality, connecting the dots between what people want and what’s actually possible. But now the tools just finally caught up to the speed of conversation.

r&d

^{I can’t NOT build things}

Always tinkering. Most of it stays private. Some might turn into products. Vibe coding, workflow automation, generative flow experiments:

VIBE-CODING /
From Scanning SHEET MUSIC to transposed ORCHESTRAL MP3

VIBE-CODING /
Algorythmic trading app

VIBE-CODING /
Wine-training app for restaurant owners

VIBE-CODING /
Spec-driven multi-agent development (BUZZ WORDS!) pipeline in cursor

VIBE-CODING / n8n /
FROM Prompt TO working n8n workflow

FLOW / LUNA / RUNWAY / KLING / ETC.
Long video formats

let’s get in touch

What comes after a handshake is a conversation. If you’ve reached this far, let’s consider it a handshake.
Now, drop me a line:

‏⤏ [email protected]