Professional work experience

Having experienced both the freelance world and full-time roles, I’ve learned that I thrive most when I can stay with one company for years. I value building long-term synergy with a team and having enough time to truly master the domain. For me, it’s about professional growth and never leaving a job unfinished.

During the years I developed a prefered dev environment - more about here.

TL;DR Summary

The Journey

Current Mission | Sabbatical & AI Orchestration

2024 – Present

After years of shifting between critical infrastructure and high-stakes broadcast engineering, I decided to take a step back and focus on my most important “long-term project”: my son. However, I’ve repurposed my professional drive into exploring the bleeding edge of AI, treating it as a new frontier for system orchestration. I am working on few projects - more about them in learning page and i am planning to make a few new.

The Next Chapter: Looking for a Team

While personal projects keep me sharp, I miss the impact of a professional environment and the logic of systems that operate at scale. I’m ready to end my sabbatical for an opportunity where engineering decisions actually matter.

I’m looking for a team that values pragmatic, sustainable builds—whether we are starting from scratch or untangling a complex legacy system. If you need an engineer who thinks in systems, prioritizes clarity over hype (and occasionally over-engineers his fridge), let’s talk!

ChyronHego Czech, s.r.o. | Senior Frontend Engineer

2012 - 2018 ~ Broadcast Graphics & Interactive Media (3+ years)

• The “Bug-for-Bug” Challenge: Engineered a React-based engine that translated complex broadcast graphics into interactive HTML. I had to achieve feature-parity with legacy quirks that had become industry standards over decades.
• Pure JS Animation: Since CSS couldn’t provide the required precision for broadcast-grade timing, I built a custom animation engine in pure JavaScript, focusing on frame-rate stability and rendering pipeline optimization.
• Scaling with Nx: During a 5x team expansion, I championed the adoption of Nx (Monorepos) to centralize UI libraries and maintain architectural sanity across growing teams.

Nuvia a.s. | Senior Software Engineer & Solution Architect

2018 - 2021 ~ Industry 4.0 & Specialized Monitoring Systems (3 years)

• Strategic Visualization: Developed an interactive hall monitoring system for manufacturing plants. By making real-time performance “visible” to management, I facilitated the expansion of our DAQ systems to international branches.

• Critical Infrastructure: Maintained and refactored databases for nuclear waste repositories. This role demanded 100% data integrity and a disciplined approach to working with highly certified legacy codebases.

• Organizational Refactoring: Modernized the internal engineering culture by defining clear FE/BE boundaries and introducing DevOps workflows (TeamCity, YouTrack) to replace manual, disorganized processes.

  This web about DAQIS is quite old; I built it in about two days using minimal graphic tools and without proper knowledge of the SW sector (at that time). The very fact that it is still here without any changes (or at least an added language mutation) speaks volumes ;-(

The Digital Nomad Era | Full-stack Freelancer

2012 - 2018 ~ Global

• Business & Communication: While traveling, I focused on building e-commerce solutions and websites where I acted as both a consultant and developer.
• Strategic Support: Contributed to complex software projects as “deadline reinforcement”. I chose roles where I could guarantee delivery despite the technical constraints of traveling.
• Holistic Approach: Leveraged my background in graphic arts to bridge the gap between aesthetics, SEO, and functional backend architecture.
• RThe Remote Pioneer: Long before remote work was the norm, I had to be a “process architect” for my clients. For many companies, I first had to design the environment and workflows—deployment pipelines, communication channels, and collaboration tools—just to make the delivery possible. It was a win-win: they gained a modern, scalable approach to development, and I mastered the art of “Remote-First” engineering.

Much of my work from that era deserves a rewrite, but why fix what isn’t broken? detska-doktorka.eu is 10 years old, yet it’s fully responsive and runs on a simple, custom CMS. It’s a pro bono project with a modernized backend and updated jQuery—it works, I still like the design, so why touch it? :-)

Red-Hat | Software Engineer (Intern to Junior Dev)

2010 - 2012 ~ JBoss Ecosystem

• Engineering Boot Camp: My first exposure to professional, large-scale engineering. I specialized in reproducing and debugging complex issues within the JBoss environment.
• Open Source Discipline: Learned the importance of rigorous testing and documentation within a world-class team, forming the foundation of my pragmatic approach to code.[^1]

This was my second real job experience (the first was an internship with Pohoda). In just one month there, I learned more about teamwork, programming, and software engineering than I had in the previous few years. During my time there, they were even voted the “Best Employer” in the Czech Republic. It was a dream job - for a while.

Education & Early Roots

FIT VUT (Brno University of Technology) | Computer Science & Mathematics

• The Real CS: Finally, a place where I could dive into sophisticated algorithms and the kind of “magic” that makes modern computing work. It provided deep insights into the systems I always found fascinating.

  They told me: “Come work with us and finish your studies remotely.” But we all know how that goes. Every “boring homework” felt like a waste of time compared to doing real work with professionals and getting paid for it. Real-world engineering won.

College of Polytechnics Jihlava | Management and IT Studies

• The Integrity Test: My studies here ended abruptly after a direct confrontation regarding system security and engineering ethics. This defining moment solidified my lifelong preference for technical competence and integrity over formal titles.

  It’s a long and funny story, but it boiled down to a simple choice: either pay to “fix” a security flaw in a system authored by the lecturer I disagreed with, or leave. I chose the latter.

Secondary School of Graphic Arts (Jihlava) | Graphic Design

• Visual Craft: I studied this concurrently with my technical school to master the “other side” of software. It provided a “second pair of eyes” for UI/UX, typography, and aesthetic details that many engineers overlook.

  Despite the training, I never learned to hand-paint realistic figures—every time I try, it somehow turns into a caricature. (:o[

Secondary School of Industry (SPŠT Třebíč) | Electronic Computer Systems

• The Genesis: This is where I built my first Chess engine from scratch, obsessing over logic and rendering. While “heavy electricity” wasn’t my cup of tea, the logic of digital systems definitely was.

• National Success: Winner of a national programming competition.

  To be completely honest, the main competitor was out sick that day, but a win is a win!

Honorable Mention: The Primary School Roots

Primary School (ZŠ Valeč) | The Foundation of Critical Thinking

• The Mr. Mentor: I had the privilege of being in the class of Miloš Šlapal, now a renowned Czech expert on reading literacy and critical thinking.

  It was his first school, and we were his “guinea pigs” for methods he later refined throughout his career. Long before it was trendy, he merged Czech, History, and Civics into a single, unorthodox block. It wasn’t about memorizing dates; it was about understanding how the world, history, and people actually work… If I tend to question everything and look for the “why” behind the “what” today—it’s largely thanks to him.

• The Folklore Experiment: He once conducted a live “telephone game” to show how oral tradition works. A story was passed one-by-one through the class, gradually mutating until it reached me as a fragmented, senseless mess.

  • The Turning Point: Realizing the story had lost its meaning by the time it reached me, I instinctively reshaped it into a punchy, logical joke (which it wasn’t at the start). From that moment on, the transmission stabilized—the joke was memorable enough to stay unchanged until the last student.

  It was a profound (1st?) lesson in human psychology: information only survives if it has a clear structure. Just like the famous collectors of folk tales, I saw firsthand how we “fix” history by forcing it into a form that people actually remember.

• The Lesson on Human Nature: I remember a lesson about the Baroque era—how progress stalled, science was suppressed, and society shifted from the enlightened Renaissance toward dogmatic belief, prioritizing the word of the clergy over scientific reason. I couldn’t wrap my head around why anyone would willingly choose to go backward.

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... and he said: "That is a very good question, Alfons. It is very hard to answer in such a short time, but maybe, one day, you will have the chance to see for yourself how something like that can happen in real life."

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I find myself remembering this moment quite often. :-)

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