I have started my career as a "multimedia freelancer" helping local businesses with their websites, graphics and desktop publishing. Having already known HTML, CSS, and PHP and JavaScript basics, I played with video while growing up, which eventually pointed me towards audiovisual production for some time. I made extra money by shooting short wedding clips, graduation, propagation, and other videos during my studies. I also participated in several films (mostly student productions) doing ancillary works (from stand-in to the 2nd assistant director).
In 2013, I started working for a media agency utilising my previous freelance experience with web development and multimedia production. Having worked on a different project almost every other month enabled me to gain various levels of experience with a wide range of industries. I worked on microsites, e-shops, CMSs, CRMs, specialised B2B and B2C applications, and other back-end and front-end software projects. I also started creating open-source packages for PHP, front-end packages and maintaining several side projects.
In 2017, I joined a software development team working for the Czech copyright collective society as a senior PHP and JavaScript developer, later becoming the tech lead for the project. The scale of this project motivated me to improve my coding habits and extend my tech stack with technologies more apt to large-scale projects. I gained experience with asynchronous processing, scaling, containerisation, CI/CD, procedural SQL, TypeScript, Elasticsearch and many other things. From the failures we experienced on this project, I also gained valuable lessons for my professional development - both technical and managerial. This experience also made me look for more performant alternatives to PHP and Node.js and their toolkits. Therefore, I learned Golang (even though I left this project before we could start using it) and started experimenting with other technologies more frequently.
The experience from copyright collective society came in handy in 2019 when I joined AIMS API as a CTO (though doing most of the operational development myself at the beginning as an intersection between full-stack developer, solution architect and CTO). I helped transform the project into a stand-alone company. I keep working on strengthening the technological foundations, improving the internal standards and best practices, and bringing product ideas to production.
