Welcome to the home page of
Marek Vokac. I use these pages to present myself, my work and some of the
companies and other organisations I’m affiliated with in some way.
I’m a professional
programmer, and have been one for all my working life (see my CV if you are
curious about the details). It has been a rewarding profession in most senses
of the word, and I fully expect it to continue - there seems little chance of
programming becoming obsolete or the market being saturated within the foreseeable
future.
In November 2005 I
completed my PhD dissertation, On the practical use of
Software Design Pattern. It is a work in the field of Software Engineering
research, i.e., research into how software developers go about their business. I always felt that knowing my profession
both from the inside and outside would be more interesting than either one of
those standpoints by itself.
A PhD degree is first and
foremost an education in how to perform research. That was most interesting,
and kept me occupied for three years. I spent those years mostly at the Simula Research Laboratory, a new research organisation set up
as part of the IT Fornebu project at
We’re currently in
the process of recreating our product, simultaneously solving the problems
involved in making an application that runs on the Web but is interactive like
one on your own computer; is snappy for one user but scalable to thousands;
work perfectly right out of the box but can be customized almost indefinitely;
has a stateless service-oriented architecture but is a true application (not
just a set of pages); and is a world-class SDK as well as being an application.
All this with a compact team (six developers for most of the time), on a new
platform (C#, ASP.NET 2.0). If you’re in the business you’ll
understand that success here requires and extraordinary team, and I have the
privilege of being the tech lead for what is probably the best team in the
country. I’ve been there for nine years and love the place. If you’re
thinking about offering me a job, be warned – I don’t come cheap,
and I’m choosy. On the other hand, I deliver.
Life is not all work, and
having two children aged 9 and 11 tends to remind one of that fact rather
continuously. If you are planning to have children yourself, be warned - there
is no bigger project. So there is a lot of play in my life as well.
Speaking of play, the
difference between men and boys is the price of the toys, right? In my case the
toys may not be very expensive, but the expedition to
Why is this text in English? Well - it’s the primary language of the Net. I have friends in far-away places who prefer English. And it’s easy to write.
Men, det er noe for de norske her også, selv om jeg ikke har tenkt å vedlikeholde alle sidene på to-tre språk. Jeg prøver å avpasse språket til stoffet, så norske hendelser kommer på norsk, mens ekspedisjoner til Canada typisk vil være på engelsk. Klager mottas... på både norsk, engelsk og tsjekkisk.