Hello!

I was born in the eastern part of Slovakia, where I’ve spent the first 18 years of my life biking, fishing, going to school, playing video games and doing whatever shenanigans little kids usually do when they are little kids.

It was around this time I got my first computer (it had a 75Mhz processor, 16 MB of RAM and 1GB HDD). Well, let’s say I started to spend less time outside since then.

The year I started studying at the technical high school and also the year our household got connected to the word wide web. I started dabbling with web development and created first basic pages. My computer was no longer just a glorified game console.

I moved to Bratislava to start my university studies. I did various part time jobs, some of them unrelated to IT. Ultimately, I didn't finish my course as I realized I fell much more comfortable working in the office than listening to lectures in auditoriums.

I started my first permanent job in Lomtec.com as a front-end developer. It was the time when the infamous Internet Explorer 6 was still a thing, so let's say I've learned my ropes the hard way.

I continued my journey as a front-end developer in another company - Redworks Digital Bratislava. While the job itself became kinda stale very quickly, I was lucky to have great coworkers. Sometimes it felt more like being in high school again than in work. Fun times.

The Redworks company decided to close the Bratislava office and I decided it's time to go freelance. I moved back to my hometown and started focusing 100% on creating web templates for the Themeforest.net platform. My first humble success was with Tumblr themes and some basic Photoshop and HTML templates. It took some time before I gained enough experience and transitioned into developing WordPress themes.

The year of a breakthrough moment in my Themeforest career. BeautySpot, a WordPress theme for beauty salons, was a modest hit. My hard work and dedication finally paid off. And I also moved to Prague, because why not?

I continued to ride the wave of success with my TownPress and BlueCollar themes. TownPress was the first serious municipality WordPress theme available and it quickly became my biggest hit, with more than 3000 licenses sold to date.

Around this time I realized that I am enjoying the coding part of the development process much more than the designing part, so I started working with an external designer and focused solely on coding.

My first product which emerged from the cooperation was Lore, a knowledge base WordPress theme.

The next template made in cooperation with an external designer was Pressville - my second municipality WordPress theme. It took me around eight months to develop it, mainly because I built a robust framework around it. It handled many advanced concepts like recurring events, directory of listings and document management.

After I finished this one, I felt that I have to slow down. I spent the last five years working almost every day - 12 or 14 hour work days were nothing extraordinary to me. I focused on supporting and updating my existing items for the next few years. I rewrote all my older themes to the new framework which gave them a new breath of life.

I released yet another municipal WordPress theme - Wordbench. My third cooperation with an external designer was very ambitious, yet it was hardly a commercial success.

The market changed dramatically during the last few years. Themeforest became oversaturated with templates and more and more people were choosing various site builders to create their websites instead of going with traditional themes.

After a decade of working as an Envato marketplace author, with thousands of hours spent creating, improving and supporting my templates, I decided it's time to move on. However, before starting the next chapter in my career, I released one more item on ThemeForest: Lineago - a genealogy WordPress theme.

Once the theme was released, I focused all my energy on searching for a full-time job, where I could meet new people and learn new skills. While I've achieved a lot in the last ten years, it certainly took its toll on my coding knowledge outside of WordPress themes. I missed the train when it comes to modern frontend development tools like reactive JavaScript. So I fully dived into courses to update my knowledge and landed a job at Woltair as a Svelte developer.

It took me few months to get up to speed with modern JavaScript development and once I was ready, I got an important task: to create a components library written in Svelte and documented in Storybook, specifically designed for in-house apps.

This project was very demanding, but it was a success. By the end of 2023, the WUI (Woltair User Interface) was already being widely used by most of Woltair's frontend developers and I was slowly getting ready to move to a new endeavor.