
Jano Suchal
Verified Expert in Engineering
Software Developer
Bratislava, Bratislava Region, Slovakia
Toptal member since March 24, 2014
Jano is a full-stack developer and founder specializing in databases. Using PostgreSQL, he has worked on database services with government data, recommendation engines, and performance optimization projects and has experience with startups, consulting, and leading small teams. Jano has a master's degree (summa cum laude) in software engineering from the Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava.
Portfolio
Experience
- Ruby on Rails (RoR) - 8 years
- Ruby - 8 years
- Object-oriented Design (OOD) - 7 years
- JavaScript - 5 years
- PostgreSQL - 5 years
- Linux - 4 years
- Elasticsearch - 2 years
- Redis - 2 years
Availability
Preferred Environment
Linux, PostgreSQL, Ruby, Agile Software Development
The most amazing...
...things I've built are apps using public data in Slovakia, making contracts and public registers easier to use for journalists and the general public.
Work Experience
Lead Developer and Project Manager
Slovensko.Digital
- Led a small team of developers and freelancers to build parallel, low-cost e-government services.
- Created a platform for downloading/cleaning public open data sets with millions of entries and gigabytes of data.
- Built a fast autocomplete search based on Elasticsearch.
- Managed multiple servers serving staging/production environments with Docker-based deployment.
- Supported various tools needed for business (Trello, Jira, email servers, billing, AWS).
Owner
minio, s.r.o.
- Created a platform for scraping various public government registers and databases.
- Built a platform for automatic data disambiguation, cleaning, and reconciliation of multiple messy public datasets.
- Managed traffic/performance analytics for several projects.
- Built a platform for making government contracts transparently available for anyone in Slovakia.
- Managed a search engine with 600,000+ documents (TBs of raw data).
- Organized a monthly polyglot developer meet-up in Bratislava every month since 2011.
- Created a system for fraud detection in European Social Fund project proposals.
Senior Developer
SearchD/Luigi's Box
- Created a scalable log processing pipeline analyzing millions of events.
- Designed advanced metrics and reports for testing and evaluation of real-world search engines.
- Contributed to the full stack—from business goals through front-end tuning to back-end development and tuning.
- Ensured high code quality by enforcing automatic testing on the build server, code coverage trend reporting, and code reviews.
- Proposed and successfully implemented business process changes to optimize signup and onboarding funnels, yielding an increase in goal conversions.
Senior Back-end Developer
SynopsiTV
- Created a recommendation engine for movies and television shows.
- Built a logging and quality evaluation platform for a recommendation engine and search-related sub-projects.
- Proposed and measured several UX enhancements on user-facing pages.
- Created a crawling service scraping data from various online sources.
- Implemented various duplicate matching algorithms for cleaning and disambiguating data.
Founder
Foaf.sk
- Created and sold a project to download, clean, and update data about over 300,000 companies and 500,000 people from the official registers of Slovak companies, public procurement, debts, internet domains, and other public data.
- Supported a complex site handling over 500,000 page views a month.
- Created a framework for scraping, cleaning, and merging messy datasets.
- Built various visualizations and aggregation reports from gathered data.
- Fine-tuned autocomplete search for highly relevant instant responses.
Researcher | PhD Student
Faculty of Informatics and Information Technologies
- Built a news recommendation engine for the largest Slovak newspaper peaking at 3,000+ rpm.
- Created and led a new course on full-stack web development.
- Published multiple articles on recommendation systems and data mining.
- Led multiple teams of students on various projects.
- Built and supported various faculty websites and apps.
Contractor
Freelance
- Built a "did you mean?" search feature for a major music website in Slovakia.
- Built and maintained web applications for various SMEs.
- Consulted several clients regarding SQL performance fine-tuning.
- Created a popular random text generator for designers.
- Handled basic HTML/CSS work for various clients in the eCommerce sector.
Experience
SynopsiTV
Open Contracts
Social Network of Slovak Companies
API for All Slovak Government Data
https://ekosystem.slovensko.digitalSearchD/Luigis's Box
https://www.luigisbox.com/Fraud Detection in European Social Fund Project Proposals
It identifies conflicts of interests between various stakeholders of the project by analyzing relationships within data.
Garelic
https://github.com/jsuchal/garelicEducation
PhD (Unfinished) Degree in Machine learning
Slovak University of Technology - Bratislava
Master's (Summa Cum Laude) Degree in Software Engineering
Slovak University of Technology - Bratislava
Bachelor's Degree in Informatics
Slovak University of Technology - Bratislava
Skills
Libraries/APIs
X (formerly Twitter) API, Facebook API, jQuery, GitHub API, Sidekiq
Tools
RSpec, SaltStack, Jira, Git, GitHub, RubyMine
Languages
Ruby, SQL, PHP, JavaScript, R, CoffeeScript, HTML5
Frameworks
Ruby on Rails (RoR), Sinatra
Paradigms
Agile Software Development, Test-driven Development (TDD), Object-oriented Design (OOD), Behavior-driven Development (BDD), Dependency Injection
Platforms
Salesforce, Linux, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Docker
Storage
Elasticsearch, Redis, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Sphinx Search Engine, Polyglot Persistence
Other
API Integration, APIs, Machine Learning, Recommendation Systems, Full-stack, Consulting, CTO, Analytics
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