about me

Hi, I'm Jan 👋

Tech founder and hardcore engineer from the Czech Republic. I deployed my first web application over 20 years ago and never really stopped.

Serial founder, software architect, PHP geek by origin. I build products end to end — from the database migration to the pricing page — and I take on the problems other people have already given up on.

I was trained at Salesforce and Oracle in San Francisco and at Google in Palo Alto. Still one of the things I'm proudest of.

Whatever can be built in the open, I build in the open.

currently: busy, caffeinated, shipping

what I do

Portrait of Jan Mikeš
  • Building awesome productsStartup spirit through and through, and stubbornly challenge-driven. I start products, run them, and stay close enough to the code to still be useful at 2am.
  • Engineering & architectureI genuinely love technical debt. Taming legacy code at scale is a rare skill, and it’s the one I’m best at — alongside system architecture, CI/CD, containers and performance.
  • SharingI love open source. Whatever can be public, I make public — and I speak at meetups and conferences about what I learn along the way.

currently building

MySpeedPuzzling.com

The largest speed puzzling community database in the world, built from scratch and bootstrapped. It is a nights-and-weekends hobby that quietly grew past 11,000 users — and it is fully open source.

11k+ usersopen sourcebootstrappedside project

…and many more. Consulting and advisory alongside it.

things I love talking about

  • building startups
  • CI/CD
  • containers
  • automation
  • TDD
  • DDD
  • PHP architecture
  • monorepos
  • legacy code
  • performance
  • Claude Code
  • AI-assisted development

I used to be a sceptic about AI. Then I actually used Claude Code properly, and now I run twenty things at once and feel a bit like a superhero — which is exactly as exhausting as it sounds. 🙂

Slides from my talks

get in touch

Say hello — about a product, a stuck codebase, a talk, or jigsaw puzzles.

email
j.mikes@me.com
phone
+420 773 686 207
github
github.com/janmikes
linkedin
linkedin.com/in/jan-mikes