MichalCiesla

Primary school me was already very much interested in working with computers and attended a summer course on photography and website development organised by my primary school. Later I also took extracurricular classes on computer graphics. Before concluding primary school, I taught myself the basics of programming in Java.

I chose a major in computer science at my secondary school, where I improved in programming and learned about hardware, networking and microcontrollers. I also got certified as a Cisco Certified Networking Associate. Because my secondary school offers a major only in the third and fourth year, I have also learned electronics and engineering, including manufacturing and machining. During this time I was already interested in science, and this interest later led me to get a university degree in a second field.

During secondary school, I was accepted into the Microsoft Students Trainee Centre, which connects secondary-school students interested in IT (as well as economics and marketing) with mentors from the IT industry under the supervision of the education section of Microsoft. There I had further opportunities to improve in programming and public speaking, learned UI and UX design along with UWP app development directly from experts from Microsoft, made new professional and personal connections and attend a handful of tech conferences (most notably TechEd DevCon). I also got certified as a Microsoft Office Specialist during this programme which concluded in me givin a lecture to primary school teachers.

I have continued studying computer science at Unicorn University, where I studied Systems Engineering and Information Technology. I chose this university because I was eager to learn cutting-edge tech, which was not possible at public universities. Part of my studies there were also economics classes and I finished by taking state exams in both economics and informatics, as well as defending my thesis regarding the Perlin Noise algorithm.

My passion for science then took me to the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of the Charles University, where I studied physics and later astrophysics. I wrote a Bachelors' thesis on meteor showe identification and a Masters' thesis on solar pores.

During the second university, I found that I'd enjoy engineering more than scientific research and am planning a year-long engineering traineeship with the European Southern Observatory.

I took my secondary school mandatory internships (and later independently worked part-time, together for about 8 months) at a local IT firm, HSC Computers. I partook in both software and hardware maintanance, logistics of shipments and procurements and pre-installing computers for clients. This firm specializes in supplying tens of pre-installed and pre-configured computers and during the later phases, I worked on automating much of these processes.

Under Learniga, I developed two commissined applications in 2020 and 2022. R3set is a Universal Windows Platform app meant for school IT techs which simplifies resetting user passwords in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. CityCouncil is a Microsoft Teams which streamlines accessing meeting plans and documents during city council meetings.

In 2021 I worked part-time as a front-end developer at TwoDo. There I worked on modernizing one massive website of a long-time customer, shipping two customer websites, and laying the groundwork for their content management system, TwoDo CMS. I have spent 9 months there and had to leave due to starting at my second university and being overwhelmed by university work.

My programming journey begun with Minecraft when I wanted to try my hand at modding. That lead me to learn Java back in 2014.

That changed almost immediately, as programming classes at my secondary schools taught programming in C#. I found myself liking C# much more and it's still my preferred language for essentially anything. It's the language I have the most experience with, I've used it to develop console, windowed and web applications. I use the WinUI, MAUI and Uno frameworks, depending on what platforms I need to support.

I mostly develop websites with PHP, especially due to the extreme affordability of hosting services. I have developed both tiny, single-purpose web pages as well as massive projects with content management and similar functionalities. I typically choose the Slim framework for larger web projects.

For web front-ends I usually chose some form of the React framework (lately either Gatsby or preact), in which I plenty of experience. Although lately I've been returning to good old HTML, with some help from the Sass and TypeScript preprocessors to aid development and the Latte and Twig templating libraries.

In regards to microcontrollers, my platform of choice is Raspberry Pi Pico. I use the C language to program them. I have been working with C ever since secondary school and even though I've worked with C++ as well, personally I prefer just C.

I have also worked with the Ruby and Python languages and ecosystem and I am not fond of either of them. I perceive them as inefficient, mostly from perspectives of performance and architecture (I see their structure as not sufficiently partial to robustness, which is an issue for codebases with a large potential for growth). The software part of my Bachelors' thesis was written in Python.

My favourite tasks in programming include efficient acquisition and processing of arbitrary data. I enjoy finding structure in datasets, designing data models, and writing dedicated libraries for different APIs. I also take great care to pay attention to proper UX design and come up with ergonomic ways to use my programs.