What lies beyond the horizon, I drag here through technology.
— That's not a metaphor. That's a job description.
There are engineers who solve problems that already exist. And there are engineers who solve problems the world hasn't named yet. I've always been in the second group — not out of stubbornness, but because what's coming has always interested me more than what already is.
And to this day I say the same thing: if you want to be competitive in the 21st century, you have to build products for the 22nd.
Thirty years.
Always ahead.
Adbuka served a billion impressions per month, and was the fastest-loading marketing platform globally (New Relic App Speed Index, three consecutive months). And: two intentionally separated databases with no joins between them — privacy-by-design five years before GDPR became law.
I'm not just an engineer. I painted — well enough that my art teacher suggested the Academy of Fine Arts. I turned it down, not because art didn't matter, but because I was searching for a more concrete form: how to make technology serve people, not the other way around.
But the aesthetics stayed. I've always preferred graphite, charcoal, pencil over color. Color is the easy path. Create something with minimalism, with the nuances of what isn't color — with absence. Only then do you know if you understand form.
That philosophy didn't disappear when I closed the sketchbook. It lives in every interface I've built, in every architecture where I chose what to leave out before what to add.
My architecture has never followed industry consensus. It follows the problem. The industry says "too complicated" — I hear "not yet solved."
Improvisation isn't the absence of a plan. Improvisation is a plan being executed under pressure no one predicted.
— 63rd Parachute Brigade, lesson learned
I was part of the 63rd Parachute Brigade. Before that, a cadet at the Military Air Academy for pilots, which I left because I couldn't sacrifice freedom for flight. That's when I learned one of life's most important lessons: you can't always have two excellent options at the same time.
The Academy gave me two things I still use every day. Flying taught me that procedures aren't bureaucracy — they're the difference between landing and not landing. And on the range, where I shot best in my class, I learned that precision isn't about force. It's about stillness.
Martial arts — karate, judo — teach two seemingly opposite things: to yield in order to win, and to be absolutely decisive when the moment comes. Those two principles — flexibility and resolve — run through everything I've built. Opt-in advertising instead of forced targeting. Privacy-by-design instead of retroactive compliance.
Code.
And prose.
Writing taught me that precision and economy in language are the same virtues I seek in code. And vice versa.
Zen and the Art of Database Design →Use AI, Don't Obey It →
I've been running for over four decades — from Belgrade to Bratislava, from military training grounds to city parks. Running taught me there's a difference between pain that destroys you and pain that builds you. And that once you've started — you've started. No take-backs.
No less important than anything above — I'm a father of three. A family man. That's not a footnote to a career — it's its foundation.
My daughter is a psychologist and writer. My son is a student still finding his path — from culinary chef to marine biologist, maybe a writer, who knows. He's young, let him search. My youngest says: when I grow up, I'm going to be a bookseller. Because we have a problem — every apartment we move into becomes too small because of our books. My wife Violeta also writes.
The whole family writes. That's not a coincidence.
What would have happened if I'd been born in America? Three friends from my university, right when the Macintosh was just emerging, built Vučko — literally "little wolf cub" — a PC more powerful than anything people could have on their desks at the time. Right moment. Wrong country. The machine existed. The investors didn't.
I grew up building on a market that was still waking up — no Silicon Valley safety net, no ecosystem, no easy capital. Some of those bets landed. Some didn't. C'est la vie. But thirty years of being early teaches you something that can't be learned any other way: how to read when the moment is actually right. Every failed timing sharpened the next call. That's one of the real advantages I carry into everything I'm building now.
Technology changes. The question stays the same:
How do I extract signal from chaos that means something to someone?
— The work I do. And the work I'll keep doing as long as I can run.
Bratislava, 2026.
great.
Oblik s.r.o. · Bratislava, Slovakia
Software · AI · Product Engineering