Martin Roček
Senior developer at Charles University, doing 🪄 in JS/TS, PHP and a bit of Python. Freelance designer on the side.
Freelance programmer and designer at Self-employed
Highlights
Full profile
Career: 6
Self-employed
Remote
Freelance design and frontend development, working with founders and small teams who need both handled by one person. Visual identity work — logos, brand systems, type and colour decisions — through to high-fidelity interfaces built in React (sometimes Vue, with Laravel on the backend when the project calls for it). Most engagements run end to end: starting with the brand or the blank page, ending with a site or product that's actually shipped. The design leads, the code follows — but I'm the one doing both, so nothing gets lost in translation between the two. Small, considered work for people who notice the details. Or, put another way: I'm the designer who writes React, and the developer who spends too long picking the right weight of a typeface.
Faculty of Arts, Charles University
Senior developer on the tech team, working across the faculty on tools for humanities research. Most of the work falls into three overlapping areas: Building internal web applications end to end — design, frontend, backend — in Next.js, Express, and Laravel. These are the tools departments actually use day to day: workflow systems, data management, the unglamorous infrastructure that makes research admin less painful. Sitting between the technology and the researchers. A lot of my job is translation: helping humanities projects figure out what they actually need technically, sketching architectures, and making sure the computational side stays approachable for people whose background isn’t in code. Full-stack engineering on top of that — frontend interfaces and backend APIs built around the shape of academic data, which rarely looks like anything a standard CRUD app expects.
Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften
Worked on various digital humanities applications and approaches.
Charles University
Principal Investigator of the project 'Dreams, Money and Christ: Popular Texts and Their Transmission in the Late Middle Ages", the aim was to develop a prototype application that would allow semantic comparison of medieval Latin texts using machine learning.
Isleward
Isleward is a moddable, multiplayer roguelike game that runs in a browser. I contribute to the project's code and work closely with the author on server infrastructure and deployment.
Archivist
Vojenský ústřední archiv
Projects: 8
A browser-based application designed to restore legibility to digitized medieval manuscripts by removing ink bleed-through. By aligning and processing recto/verso scans, the tool provides humanists and researchers with a streamlined way to enhance historical documents without requiring specialized technical expertise. Stack: React.js, Vite, Python
A collaborative workspace for digital humanities research. Manu enables scholars to import IIIF-based manuscripts, apply precision annotations, and generate AI transcriptions via Google Gemini. The platform prioritizes open standards (W3C) and data portability, providing a robust infrastructure for both individual and institutional research projects. Stack: Next.js, WebSockets, Node.js, MongoDB
An application for evaluation of academic staff. Tech: Express.js, Next.js, MongoDB, websockets
An online version of the Bosworth-Toller's Anglo-Saxon dictionary. Stack: Laravel, Nuxt.js, MySQL
A lightbox inspired Vue.js component.
An app for student’s evaluation of lectures and teachers at Charles University. Stack: Laravel, MySQL, Vue
Web application presenting the manuscript of the Lipnice Bible. Stack: Express.js, MongoDB, Nuxt.js
Vocabula.lat is not exactly a dictionary, but rather a tool that aggregates data from several other dictionaries. It was developed as a tool to help me translate my latin texts and provide me with grammatical information about each word. Stack: React.js, Express.js
Publications: 6
Your vibe-coded app is not sustainable
leaflet.rocek.dev
Vibe-Coding in (Digital) Humanities
leaflet.rocek.dev
Other publications
Beyond the Canon: Exploring Overlooked Medieval Texts
Doležalová, Lucie, Fúsik, Ondřej, Kozák, Jakub, Pacovský, Karel, Roček, Martin
Bosworth-Toller’s Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Online
Structuring Lexical Data and Digitising Dictionaries
Book ChapterTichý, Ondřej, Roček, Martin
Opuscula - korpus latinských textů z rukopisů Kříže z Telče
Doležalová, Lucie, Bendová, Berenika, Dragoun, Michal, Fúsik, Ondřej, Hlaváčková, Veronika, Kozák, Jakub, Pacovský, Karel, Roček, Martin, Tříska, Pavel
Výklad snů
Opuscula.Neznámá dílka z rukopisů Kříže z Telče
Book ChapterRoček, Martin, Doležalová, Lucie, Králová, Magda
Skills: 31
Technical
Creative
Other
Credentials: 1
Natural Language Processing with Machine Learning
Educative, Inc.
Education: 4
Doctor of Philosophy, Medieval and Neo-Latin Studies
Thesis: Unraveling the Contaminated Tradition: Medieval Dreambooks in Bohemical Manuscripts
Master's degree, General History
Thesis: Monsters in Medieval Imagination of British Isles
Aberystwyth University
Erasmus
Bachelor's degree, History
Thesis: Dispute over Catholic and Protestant notions of purgatory in the 16th century
Languages: 2
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