Pálinkás András

I have been building software since 2011. The path was not the usual one: I started in testing and test automation, spent years going deep on how to tell whether software actually works, led QA teams — and then moved back to writing the systems themselves. Today I work as a principal software engineer on backend microservices in a cross-functional team.

That detour is the most useful thing about how I work. Most engineers learn what a system does; a few years in testing teaches you what it does when something goes wrong — on bad input, under load, at three in the morning after a deploy. I design with those cases in mind from the start, because I have spent a long time being the person who finds them.

The industries left a mark too. Automotive steering systems, medical imaging, insurance telematics — in all of them a defect is not a bad review, it is a real-world consequence. That is where my preference for boring technology and careful data handling comes from. It is not conservatism; it is knowing what the alternative costs.

Buildsnap is where I build and run my own products. Operating them teaches something employment does not: when the bill for a badly written background job lands on your own desk, you learn quickly which decisions are expensive and which only look expensive.