Hello and thanks for stopping by! I’m a Production Engineer focused on building secure and reliable infrastructure. To learn more about me check out my LinkedIn profile or my Github.
Talks
SRECon18 Americas - Security as a Service
How to pronounce my name
The first question virtually everyone asks me is how to pronounce my name. My answer is always the same: “Thank you very much for asking. Please pronounce it however you like. I stopped caring 15 minutes after crossing the US border”. Coincidentally, people are inherently curious, so here I explain it the best I can.
My first name is Wojciech (IPA: [ˈvɔjt͡ɕɛx]) sounds a little like voychek. However, the k sound at the end is actually not the correct sound and it should be replaced with a voiceless velar fricative—think the ch in loch pronounced by a true Scotsman. But on a daily basis k is a good enough replacement, so please don’t fret about this. Wikipedia has a superb example of how to pronounce my name correctly.
However, and here things get tricky, this form of my name is very formal and used only on documents, in official matters, when one gets married or his mother scolds him. As you can see, it’s quite unlikely for you to need it.
I usually introduce myself using a much more common diminutive form—Wojtek (IPA: [ˈvɔjtɛk]) (again, Wikipedia has a good recording). As you may notice, this sounds similar to ‘voychek’, so it easily leads to confusion, however—as I mentioned before—I don’t really care, feel free to pronounce it however you like. Likely you’re going to land somewhere on the spectrum between those two forms and that’s absolutely fine.
Some people asked me in the past wether there’s a nickname I use instead of my name, especially one that is easy to pronounce for an English speaker. Actually, there’s none. I like my name and want to stick with it.
As for my surname here’s the best IPA I came up with: [vɔjˈtɨɲak].