Radim cut his IT teeth on C64 (BASIC 2.0 and assembly) in the early 90s. After the usual journey through Windows (.NET competition, C#), he ended up using and developing for UNIXy systems—mostly Debian and OS X. His fondness of low-level optimization (graphics and AI game programmer, C++) eventually transitioned into high-level optimization of business solutions and processes.
Radim’s 2007 employment as a programmer at Seznam.cz, an online search and marketing portal, resulted in formation of Seznam’s research department in 2008, of which he was the first leader. His team’s tasks included fulltext search enhancements, query correction, language identification, porn detection, contextual advertising &c, as well as cooperating with partner universities.
Radim completed his Ph.D. in computer science while living in Thailand in 2010 and 2011, winning a national Scopus “Czech Hope” award for his research.
After a short start-up stint in Berlin in 2012, he has been running his own freelance&consulting business, helping companies develop scalable systems for search and text analysis. Radim holds a Project Management and Situational Leadership management certificates from the Center for Leader Studies in Prague.
Favourite tools: whatever’s appropriate for the job; a basic enumeration of known technologies includes sysadmin tools (bash, init scripts, Monit, Nagios…), web (Nginx, Apache, Django, PHP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Selenium…), search&data (IPython, NumPy, Node.js, Lucene, SQL+ORM, Elasticsearch, Hadoop&HDFS…).
Open source: giving back where he can, Radim is the creator/maintainer of: a machine learning library, similarity database server, SQLite multithreading for Python, wrapper for C/Fortran linear algebra library. He also likes to contribute to other open source: askbot, pattern, jusText…
(apologies for the 3rd person mode; it’s for copy&paste purposes)
