I help startups to turn their idea into an MVP or a more mature product. My level of involvement varies among advising on MVP (validation, scope, technologies, implementation plan), selecting a subcontractor team, managing subcontractors, hiring and managing developers and other team members and developing MVPs.

Consulting CTO

* Specifying the scope of the MVP 
* Specifying the technology stack for the product 
* Hiring and managing subcontractors (developers, graphic designer) 
* Defining the software development process 
* Participating in developing the MVP (read: coding) * Negotiating (as a co-founder) with investors/the accelerator

* Introducing modern software development practices over an existing code base 
* Managing a team of 4 developers (was 2 before my arrival) 
* Helping the management set the goals & priorities for the product 
* Solving outstanding communication issues between the development team and the rest of the company 
* Helping to define new roles for the rest of the company to ease the pressure on the dev. team 
* Recruiting and hiring developers and 'semi-technical', tech-savvy people

Leading and coordinating the development of Noispot social jukebox.

Co-Founder & CEO

A few years after coming up with the idea of a jukebox controlled by group of people using a mobile app, I founded Noispot when I met would-be co-founder. We have raised $650 000 USD in seed capital by the end of 2011, less than a year after starting. As the technical co-founder of an early stage startup, my role and duties varied a lot during a bumpy ride: 
- defining the MVP 
- implementing the MVP end-to-end (mobile and backend with some embedded linux experience) 
- dealing with legal stuff related to music rights 
- negotiating with VCs 
- hiring technical and non-technical talent 
- managing technical talent (our development team consisted of 6 people) 
- managing technical/development subcontractors - building the right development culture, choosing tools and methodologies - product management (prioritizing the development, deciding on features to be implemented/delayed/ dropped)

Co-Founder & CTO

Worked with a number of US and EU clients, mainly on mobile projects, usually involving back end development and development consulting as well. My main selling points over the competition were: - the ability to communicate well - being able to help with figuring out the right scope for the project (usually cutting back on functionality to facilitate a shorter time to market) - offering easy to understand alternatives when the originally envisioned functionality proved to be problematic (either too complex to implement or not very user friendly) - coming up with ideas and suggestions to improve user experience (this involved both UI, business flow changes as well as bringing in technical insights on what can be automated with reasonable effort) - providing high quality output, that's easy for other developers to take on in the future

Freelance Software Developer

At Nokia Research Center, I had the chance to develop software for smart phones at a time, when people would say 'phones are for making calls' for many more years. I received my first smart phone, a 9210 communicator, in 2001. In the years to come, I've worked on a number of fascinating prototyping projects, an experience that helps me a lot today. (The only drawback is that most innovative app ideas I see 10+ years later make me yawn.)

Research Engineer

Freelance Developer

Researcher

I have been building web services/back ends with Django in the last four years. I've started using it at version 1.2. I've used it both for creating APIs (bare bones, tasty pie & django rest framework) and standard web sites. The APIs served as a back end for both mobile and html5 clients.

I have my own project template/layout that I created from two open source ones based on (and adding my) experience. It's yet to be open sourced. Before 1.7, I have used South extensively for migrations (now using the built in migration tool, which is also based on South).

I've started using python as a secondary language besides java. I have used jython to script a java application of ours (jsr82 bluetooth simulator), to build web apps (web.py & django), an embedded, remote controlled music player (for my startup called noispot), running on a sheeva plug. (The sheeva plug is/was a small embedded computer like the RaspberryPi, but without a display connector.) The latter is a heavily multi-threaded application that has to run reliably for extended periods of time (30+ days) even if the network goes down.

I've been a mobile developer for 14 years, android is the latest platform I've learned. I've created several applications as a freelancer, created the MVP for my first startup for android (that was a phonegap based one) and then participated in the development of native reimplementation of it.

I have a very deep experience with java, though I haven't used it much in the past few years for anything but android development. In the past I've used it to create desktop applications (swing), server applications (servlets, ancient web frame works, EJB3), mobile apps (j2me, blackberry and android).

I've been using javascript to create front ends, mobile apps (PhoneGap) and nodejs/socketio services. I'm interested in creating maintainable and clean code using the well known JS patterns.

I've been managing and organizing 3 teams using scrum as a CTO:
- my first startup with 5 developers
- a company, where I was the CTO, 4 developers (+me)
- our current startup (team consists of external subcontractors for now)

We do 2 week long sprints, planning poker, use kanban, I regularly talk to the users/stake holders about the priorities.

I take testing seriously. I use TDD to create some parts of my software, while I use regular testing to create some other (well, most) parts. Since most of the software I build is from the scratch and short lived (MVP, earlier prototypes), I don't aim for a 100% test coverage, nor is most of the code I write is actually DRIVEN by writing tests.

I also regularly visit code retreats to practice TDD.

I started my career as a research engineer at Nokia Research back in 2001. There I did a number of short (usually 1/2 person year) prototyping projects. These were to demonstrate a concept for a new service or to test drive a new technology. Very much akin to MVPs.

Then as a freelancer, for 3 years, I regularly consulted my clients on how to get the software we were working on to the market in the shortest possible times. Later on, as a startup founder I created the MVP that allowed us to get our first clients and the investment.

I just started to use node for our current startup. I have been, however, using javascript for 10+ years.

I use Vue to build front-ends when I'm doing full stack development.

I have some devOps chops: though I'm not an expert, I can set up a pretty decent infrastructure. I practice and believe in IaC (infrastructure as code). I'm also very much aware that a lot of time projects have an over engineered (and thus unnecessarily expensive) infrastructure.

In the last few years I'm building all of our systems so that the front end communicates with the back end using a REST API. Nowadays I'm using the Django Rest Framework to accomplish this. 

If needed, like in the case of my first startup, which was a mobile controlled social jukebox, I twist the rules: 7-8 years ago, when we started, web sockets wasn't an option for mobile apps, so I've decided to go a rest-like way to minimize latency and the number of round trips and simulate push messages over HTTP by grouping the messages to a client and pushing them down to it as a response to any request it made. (So e.g. the response for voting for a song in a play list could result in a number of unrelated messages, including new items added to the play list, chat messages received, etc.)

Personal details

Laszlo M.

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