Johnny Slakva

Engineer and builder. 20+ years shipping products from zero — first engineer, co-founder/CTO, head of engineering.

I build web and mobile apps from scratch and scale them in production. Usually I'm the person defining the architecture, making the hard tradeoffs with founders, and shipping end-to-end. Generalist by practice: frontend, backend, infrastructure, databases, integrations — whatever the product needs.

Currently building

Répliq — an AI rehearsal app for actors: it voices the other characters and listens for your lines, hands-free.
A second product, launching 2026 — more soon.

As first engineer on Wisegeek, I built a custom CMS from scratch — before mainstream CMS platforms existed — and scaled it to ~20M monthly users at peak, owning backend architecture, MySQL high-availability, and production operations for over a decade. Full experience →

I partner with founders as a founding or fractional engineer — taking new products from zero, or owning the architecture and delivery of one that's already moving. If you're building something like that, I'd like to hear about it.

Outside work: tinkering with electronics, and snowboarding — a qualified instructor.