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# A Career Fork — When Two Roads Collide
- URL: https://zahradnik.io/a-career-fork-when-two-roads-collide/
- Published: 2025-11-28T23:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-30T19:11:55.000Z
- Author: Vladimír Záhradník
- Tags: Field notes, Career path, Engineering, Art, Creativity, Origin story, Technology

**Originally published on LinkedIn (reformatted for zahradnik.io / Medium)**

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Most of us experience a moment when life splits in two directions — a fork that defines the next decade.

For me, that moment appeared in **2006**, during my final year of high school.

I’ve always had an **artistic soul** and an **engineering mind**.

For eight years I played the accordion — long enough, and well enough, to consider a conservatory.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/98/55/9855d37b-ac20-4dfa-abf2-b089f6222e9f/content/images/2025/11/562333778_25110089455252285_3050251382723578102_n.jpg)

This accordion arrived before I did — destiny in disguise. Eight years of study, twenty years of silence, and now the return begins.

  
At the same time, I was obsessed with transmission towers, antennas, and geosynchronous satellites beaming signals across continents.

Even though I later became a software engineer, it wasn’t “programming” that drew me in.  
It was the beauty of **broadcasting** — invisible waves, antennas, and the quiet hum of electricity connecting people across distance.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/98/55/9855d37b-ac20-4dfa-abf2-b089f6222e9f/content/images/2025/11/P1010335.JPG)

Transmission towers were my first temples. I still look up at them with the same awe.

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And so I made a pragmatic decision.

If I chose the artist’s path, the chances of making a living were slim.  
The engineering path promised stability — and a different kind of creativity.

That choice shaped everything that followed.

Even today, long after leaving telecommunications, I still pause to admire every satellite dish I see.  
(Proof: scroll through my early posts — there’s one of me proudly standing beside one.)

Sometimes I wonder: *what if I’d taken the other road?*  
Maybe I’d be someone like **Lucio Corsi** — an outlier artist with a small but devoted following.

Instead, I became an engineer who discovered **art inside technology** — what Paul Graham called *a hacker and a painter*.

Over time, that blend became my signature.

My artistic side is happy now.  
I’m not building a soulless company — I’m shaping something artistic *through engineering itself*.

Because in the end, creation is creation — whether you use brushes or code.

---

Follow my story.