Hey, I'm Jan!
Programmer
These days, I work at Apify as a developer of open-source tooling in TypeScript and Python. I spend most of my time on Crawlee, our web scraping framework, and its Python counterpart. I try hard to write useful software and advocate for great developer experience.
My first experience with coding was when I was 12. I made my first website in pure HTML - I think it was about video games and that it was pretty uninspired. After a few iterations of that, I started to learn PHP followed by Javascript and Python. I got captivated by that particular mix of architecture and problem solving found in programming and I realized that I wouldn't mind getting paid for doing this every day.
Computer scientist
I attended the Software Systems programme at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of the Charles University in Prague. Apart from loads of math, it gave me a good opportunity to explore big boy languages like C++ and Java (so that I know I'm not missing out by not using those much). I really enjoyed courses focused on operating system internals and distributed system architecture.
Probably the coolest project I took part in while studying was ReCodEx - a system for automated evaluation of programming assignment solutions. In plain language, this is a system where students submit source code and get near instant feedback on their programs - does it even compile? Does it pass tests? Is it fast enough? This is also a great help for teachers who get a preliminary assessment of each submission.
Open source enthusiast
I try to use free software whenever possible and occasionally contribute to open source projects. I run GNU/Linux on my laptop, and also maintain a couple of Linux servers, both for work and fun. I use Arch, btw, and code in Neovim. Feel free to browse my dotfiles if you're into that.
On top of that, I'm lucky enough to work on open source software for a living, which is pretty awesome - check out Apify's GitHub.
