About PicIt

I’m Dominik Grzeszczak, a sophomore at MIT studying electrical engineering and computer science (Course 6-2). PicIt is a small shop of things I think are worth owning — mostly for a dorm room, a desk, a gym bag, and a kitchen you share with people who do not do the dishes.

Outside this site I build hardware and software: a TypeScript CLI for Akamai’s bot protection platform, a Y Combinator-backed iOS app, PCBs and circuits for AI training data. The full record is on my personal site. I mention it because you should know who is recommending things to you before you take the recommendation.

Why PicIt exists

Searching for almost any product turns up the same thing: a page of twenty options, each with a paragraph that could have been written about any of them, ranked in an order nobody will explain. I wanted the opposite — a short list, each item with one honest paragraph about why it is on the list, and nothing on the list that I would not tell a friend to buy.

There are fewer than a hundred picks here, across eight categories. That is deliberately small. Adding a hundred more would make the site less useful, not more.

How things get picked

• Some are things I own and have used long enough to have an opinion about, including the ones that disappointed me.
• Some are things I researched hard because I was about to spend my own money, and the research was worth writing down.
• Every blurb is written by me. None of it is copied from an Amazon listing or from customer reviews.
• Nothing gets a place here because it pays more. Commission rates vary by category and I do not rank by them.

Why there are no prices or ratings

No prices, no star ratings, no review counts, no percentage-off badges, and no countdown timers. Those numbers change by the hour, and Amazon’s rules only allow showing them when they come from their API in real time. Rather than show you a number that is probably wrong, I show you none and send you to Amazon, where the number is right.

When PicIt qualifies for Amazon’s Creators API, live prices and ratings will appear with a timestamp on every figure. Not before.

How this is paid for

Affiliate commissions, and nothing else. If you buy something after clicking through, Amazon pays me a percentage and you pay the same price you would have anyway. The full version is on the disclosure page.

Getting in touch

If a pick is wrong, out of date, or you think something better exists, I want to know — that is the fastest way this site gets better. Write to dominikgural810@gmail.com.