Jen Koutny
Backend software engineer with high attention to detail.
Job experience
Backend design and implementation for The One Club for Creativity (Aug 2022 – Jan 2023)
- Closely collaborated with designers from Creative Nights to spec out a brand new digital award platform (yet to be released).
- Architected the backend stack on Strapi, Digital Ocean, Cloudinary and Stripe.
- Built a custom testing solution, setup development environment, tooling and CI/CD pipelines.
- Codified all infrastructure with Terraform and setup CD using Terraform Cloud.
- Implemented the business logic and exposed an API to be used by frontend.
Ruby on Rails Full-stack developer at Fakturoid (Nov 2021 – Jul 2022)
- Revamped full-text search built on Elastic.
- Helped the team to adopt code-review healthy for both authors and reviewers.
- Kickstarted codification of architecture with Kubernetes on Digital Ocean.
- Learned how a fully remote shop can remain pleasant and keep everyone in touch.
Typescript Developer at Trezor (Mar 2021 – Jul 2021)
- Helped developing an Electron app that provides a GUI for the Trezor hardware wallet.
- Established a culture of code documentation.
- Learned that it's usually better to listen first and talk second.
Software Engineer at GoOut (Sep 2015 – Feb 2021)
- Established culture of writing feature and technical specifications.
- Helped with choosing technologies, designing APIs and solving devOps challenges.
- Co-led a major refactoring effort that scaled GoOut from a few selected cities to any region or village in multiple countries.
- Designed, coded and deployed handful of APIs as microservices running in Kuberntes on GCP. Including activity feed (Kotlin/Spring/Elastic), user tracking (JS/Express), Facebook events scrapper (JS/Selenium) or cities and locations service (Kotlin/http4k/Elastic).
- Coded and deployed several WordPress websites for theatres and other cultural institutions. Also later helped to run them all on Kubernetes.
- Led a team of interns responsible for scraping cultural events from hundreds of websites. And implemented CI/CD for them.
- Kicked of my coding experience by writing hundreds of small JS scripts and PHP web scrapers.
Prague Sheriff at Rekola (Sep 2012 – Sep 2015)
- Managed smooth operation of Prague's most popular bike sharing.
- Led a team of bicycle repairmen servicing fleet of hundreds of bicycles.
- Designed, built, serviced and repurposed old and new bicycles.
Open Source Projects and Contributions
- Contributed to the .editorconfig specification.
- A Microservice built on Http4k over ElasticSearch serving Cities and Regions that represent real-world locations within GoOut infrastructure. Also its Ktor-based version.
- YouTube Antiprocrastinator - Firefox Addon that prevents me from burning life on YouTube by stripping its UI to the bare minimum. Explained here and open-sourced here.
- Helped with some bits on these projects: Meilisearch, http4k, rouge, ktlint, Kotlin ElasticSearch client.
- Trying to maintain a blog about my adventures and hobby projects.
- Library of bicycle parts designed with OpenSCAD for 3D printing. (Though it's just one part so far 😅.)
Education
- Knowledge Engineering dropout at Faculty of Information Technology of Czech Technical University (2015 - 2019)
- Math focused class at Gymnázium Christiana Dopplera highschool (2010 - 2015)
Skills
Technologies I consider myself to be fluent in include Kotlin, JS/TS, PHP, git, bash, Docker, Kubernetes, Elastic Search, SQL, Google Cloud Platform, Electron…
Interests
I started playing with Rust and I believe it's the language I want to master. It seems like and ideal next step in my journey of getting closer to the metal.
I like to balance my software day job by doing a lot of manual work in my free time. Currently, I'm building a camper van from the ground up. I build bicycles and sometimes other stuff. I'd really like to work on an embedded project in my next job to bridge the hardware and software worlds.
Other than that I ride bicycles a lot, sometimes do some track&field races (1500 - 5000 m), shoot analog, paraglide, rock climb, enjoy good music or trainhop.
Contacts
- me@jentak.co
- matrix: @goodhoko:matrix.org
- +420 774 619 385 (Telegram, WhatsApp)
- blog