Johnny Slakva
Engineer who builds products end to end. 20+ years from zero to live — 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 writing the code myself. Generalist by practice: frontend, backend, infrastructure, databases, integrations — whatever the product needs.
Today I build with AI in the loop: it gives me the speed, while 20 years of running production tells me what's safe to ship.
Recent builds
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Talk To MIP™
Web app · client build · live
Mip Phillips' creative-director thinking as an AI you can talk to. It started as a custom GPT built by Mip himself; I built the platform that made it a product, as sole engineer: AI chat grounded in his knowledge base, team accounts, a trial that runs itself and Stripe billing. Mip owned the product and the design, I owned everything technical.
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Répliq
iOS app · awaiting App Store review
A hands-free rehearsal app for actors. Paste a script and AI parses it into roles and gives every character its own voice. Pick your part and the app reads everyone else, listens for your lines, checks them, and moves on. No buttons from the first cue to the last.
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recadro
Open-source CLI · on npm
App Store screenshots as code. Each panel is a plain HTML page you iterate on live in the browser; one command renders every device and language at the exact sizes App Store Connect wants. Built for Répliq's own listing, and made to be driven by your coding agent.
Track record
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 →
Work with me
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. Got an idea that needs building, or a product that needs a technical owner? I'd like to hear about it.
Outside work: tinkering with electronics, and snowboarding — a qualified instructor.