About · The maker

Hi, I'm Maciej.

One person, building the file manager I always wanted to use.

Switzerland · Independent · Built in evenings

Who's behind this

I'm Maciej Raciborski, a software engineer based in Switzerland. I've been writing software professionally for 22 years, hopping between languages as the work demanded — Java, then C#, then Swift for a while, then Go, and the last few years a lot of Rust. Most of that time has been spent on distributed systems: queues, brokers, pipelines, things that have to keep working at 3am.

My day job is product owner of a Kafka platform — big enterprise plumbing, lots of customers, lots of constraints. Swift Salamander is the opposite of that: a desktop app, no committee, no quarterly roadmap, just one engineer trying to get the details right.

Why I'm building Swift Salamander

Honestly? I wanted a beautiful, lightning-fast file manager for macOS, and I couldn't find one I was happy living in. Finder is fine if you don't mind it. The third-party alternatives are powerful but rarely feel calm. I wanted dual panes that respond instantly, transfers that don't lie about progress, and a UI that gets out of the way of the actual work.

So I started building it. It's deliberately a little fun — six accent colours, three densities, a salamander mascot — but the underlying engine is serious: trash-first deletes, atomic writes, crash-recoverable operation journal, hash-verified cross-volume transfers. The kind of plumbing I'd want under my own files.

Where to find me

Email
[email protected]
LinkedIn
linkedin.com/in/maciej-raciborski
Personal
raciborski.ch
Location
Switzerland
Languages
  • Rust
  • Swift
  • Java
  • C#
  • Go
  • JavaScript
  • Kafka
  • Distributed systems

For the careful reader

Swift Salamander is operated as a private individual — there is no company, no investors, no team behind the scenes. Pro licences are sold through Polar as Merchant of Record, which means they handle billing, tax, invoicing, and refunds. Publisher details are on the Impressum page; what does and doesn't get collected is on Privacy; the EULA lives at Terms.

— Maciej