We live in the Information Age, and Jano Suchal wants that information in the hands of the people.
Jan is part of the open data movement, which seeks transparency and wants more information to be made public. Currently living in Bratislava, Slovakia with his wife and two children, Jan is a Toptal developer, community leader, and open data activist. Jan has been on the development team of three different companies all working to increase data transparency. He regularly posts online about his views, even giving a talk or two from time to time.
As it turns out, Jan discovered this dedication to the open data cause by accident during his PhD studies in Machine Learning at the Slovak University of Technology.
Jano Suchal, Open data advocate and Toptal developer
“My research was based on graphs, but I didn’t want a synthetic graph. I wanted a real one, so I downloaded a company’s register [it was public domain] and used that data for the graph. I showed it to a friend, and he suggested that we could take this one step further. With his help, I created an interface where you could easily find a person or a company and see the links between companies and people and how they are connected. We added more companies’ registers, and once we had a functioning prototype, we released it. There was no team. It was just two guys doing extra work in the evenings.”
Jan and his friend named their company and website FOAF (Friend of a Friend), and it was a massive success. The website had 3,000 visitors the day it went live. Within four months, they had 10,000 visitors a day, and in two years, 15,000-20,000. Keep in mind that Slovakia has a population just over 5 million, and those figures become all the more impressive.
They ended up selling the company only half a year after its launch, and Jan used that money to buy a new apartment and pursue his other passion: white water rafting.
Jan has been white water rafting since he was 17, and today he is one of six men on the Slovakian national white water rafting team. Jan’s team has trained together for more than 15 years, and they have been Slovakia’s national team since 2003.
White water rafting is a niche sport that pays very little money, but enthusiasts like Jan are in it for the exhilaration of navigating some of the world’s biggest rapids and for the camaraderie with the team.
“Because the sport is so small, the winning strategy is to simply let six people train a lot for ten years,” Jan jokes.
The sport may be small, but the competition is very serious. Jan’s team is part of the International Rafting Federation, and there are world championships every year in which up to forty teams compete. The competition itself has four timed events: Sprint, Slalom, Head to Head, which is a race between two boats, and Downriver, a long distance paddle. The team with the best times and scores wins.
Jan is currently training with his team to compete in this year’s world championships, which will be held in Citarik, Indonesia on Nov 29 - Dec 8. In order to qualify for the world championships, teams have to win qualifying rounds during the sport’s season, which begins in April and ends in November.
Each of Jan’s team members has a job and family, so scheduling is difficult, but the team finds time to train several times a week, in the gym and at an artificial whitewater course below a major dam on the Danube river.
Jan began his rafting career in college at a time when scheduling was much simpler. He is able to continue rafting today because he works remotely as a software developer.
Jan currently works at Minio, a company that he founded with the colleagues he met at college. They are a freelance software development company, and since 2014 they have been working on SearchD, focusing on search engine analytics. SearchD has an office, but they only use it for occasional meetings and for the most part work remotely.
“The thing with remote work is it can completely change your workflow. It’s strange, but it has a lot of benefits. I can move my work around to accommodate rafting practice and competitions There are no distractions, so I have long stretches of uninterrupted time to work. Plus, I have kids, and working remotely has allowed me to adapt to their schedule. I now I can do the bulk of my work in the morning or after 9pm.”
Jan is also part of Toptal, a network for elite freelance software developers that is known for its extremely challenging screening process.
“I applied to Toptal after I saw that only 3% of developers passed the process. I thought, of course I have to see if I can do this! I got in and really like what the company is doing, so I started referring other people to the company.”
Jan has been busy with Minio, so he has focused on the community side of things and is the Toptal community leader for Slovakia.
“I’m involved with the community because I believe in what Toptal is doing. If I didn’t already have work, I would be getting projects through Toptal. That’s a no-brainer.”
Being the community leader means that Jan is very involved with the freelance community. He plans regular events for Toptalers and those interested in the company, and he also started and runs Rubyslava, a monthly tech gathering at pubs that just recently had their 50th meeting.
“Toptal events are getting bigger and better. More and more developers are interested in working at Toptal because the payment is so much better than they’d get otherwise. You know, all the smart developers in Slovakia are commuting one hour to Vienna if they aren’t working remotely of for Toptal already because they just aren’t making enough in their local communities. Toptal prevents this commute, so the developers are happy. Plus, it keeps Slovakians employed in Slovakia, which helps the economy.”
So how did Jan get to a point where he owns his company and is a part of Toptal’s exclusive network? Few people reach this kind of success alone, and Jan is no exception to that. Jan’s father mentored him and encourage his forays into programming at a very young age.
“I was lucky enough to have access to a computer when I was twelve. My father worked at the Slovak hydrometeorological institute, forecasting weather. I would go to the institute and use my dad’s computer to play games.”
Jan’s father encouraged his interest in games and gave Jan a children’s programming book about the creation of simple games. Jan read it, and then started writing code for games on paper because he didn’t always have access to a computer.
“My father also signed me up for a programming course when I was around 14. I was the youngest one there. I didn’t really start learning until the Internet though. Then all of a sudden, I could learn on my own. I constantly wrote down all of the links I wanted to visit the next time I was online. There weren’t tutorials or anything yet, so I spent a lot of time reading manuals and reference books.”
Jan started visiting online forums in high school while studying math. At the same time, he started building websites, beginning with a personal blog, and quickly moving onto commercial projects. Jan remembers his first paid programming job in high school well. He created a Slovak character set for IBM’s Automated Banking Machines. They were ten in total, and for each one Jan got paid enough to buy “about fifty beers.”
Jan attended the Slovak University of Technology for his undergraduate and Master’s degree. During this time, he continued to do periodic freelance work, but he only took on a few projects a year. Jan studied Informatics and then Software Engineering before beginning his PhD, which focused on search and recommendation systems.
“In Slovakia, the culture is that all students go to Master’s degrees. It would be odd not to, which is unusual compared to the US, I know. I never completed my PhD though. It was a dead end. I realized that I didn’t want to write a book for 20 people in the world, and that’s basically the finish line for the program.”
Jan doesn’t regret the years he spent working on his PhD. In a few years, he used that experience with search and recommendation systems to develop a recommendation system for SynopsiTV and perform search engine analysis for SearchD. Plus, he met a lot of interesting people along the way, and without his PhD studies, he wouldn’t have formed FOAF and discovered his interest in open data.
“FOAF opened a lot of doors. That project got me very interested in open data, specifically government data, and why that data is often not open. I started talking to other people interested in open data and got involved in other projects. Today, I am kind of famous for advocating open data in Slovakia.”
For many people, calling themselves famous would be narcissism, but Jan is simply telling the truth. After selling FOAF, Jan, along with the same team, worked on projects for the Slovakian branch of Transparency International, a global effort to fight corruption and increase transparency, and Fair Play Alliance, a non-government organization that seeks to uncover the truth behind governmental actions. He helped to build Otvorenézmluvy, a project that tracks and monitors all government contracts publicly.
Naturally, such a degree of involvement has made Jan a bit of a celebrity within the Slovakian datasphere. It has also made him incredibly passionate about the topic.
“This system of transparency isn’t working, and the problem is basically the same in all countries. It’s really hard to combat though. You can’t really get the people in the government to actually do anything because they will lose money and power. I’ve been fighting for open data for 5 or 7 years now. There have been some successes, but many many failures.
“We have this major digital transformation going on in Slovakia with the help of EU funds. In the past four to seven years, we basically wasted 1.4 billion euros because of faulty or ill-advised government contracts. These results are disappointing and could have been avoided. That is why I’m doing this. That is my social and public interest.”
This interview originally appeared on Examiner.