# Martin Roček (@martin.rocek.dev)

Profile: https://sifa.id/p/martin.rocek.dev
Headline: Senior developer at Charles University, doing 🪄 in JS/TS, PHP and a bit of Python. Freelance designer on the side.

## About

Freelance Developer & Designer with a background in Digital Humanities. I hold a PhD from Charles University in Prague, where I researched the textual transmission of medieval Latin manuscripts — and along the way, I started building the digital tools that scholars like me actually needed.

That's led to projects like Manu, a collaborative annotation platform for manuscript research, and humanities.tools, a curated catalogue for the Digital Humanities community. I design and build these end to end — visual identity, interface, and code — because how something looks matters just as much as how it works.

My freelance work is in React, Vue, and Laravel, but I spend as much time in Figma as in a code editor. I take on projects for clients who want something that feels considered — where the logo and the component library are part of the same conversation.

## Career

- **Freelance programmer and designer at Self-employed** (Mar 2014 - Present)
  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.
- **Full Stack Engineer at Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague** (Oct 2022 - Present)
  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.
- **Scholarship Holder at Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften** (Jan 2023 - Dec 2023)
  Worked on various digital humanities applications and approaches.
- **Principal Investigator at Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague** (May 2021 - Apr 2023)
  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.
- **Graphic Artist (volunteer) at Isleward** (May 2016 - Jan 2018)
  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 at Vojenský ústřední archiv** (Aug 2013 - Feb 2016)

## Projects

- **Translucens** — https://translucens.humanities.tools (Jan 2026 - Present)
  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
- **MANU** — https://manu.is (Jun 2024 - Present)
  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
- **Hodnocení akademických a vědeckých pracovníků** (Apr 2022 - Present)
  An application for evaluation of academic staff.
  
  Tech: Express.js, Next.js, MongoDB, websockets 
- **Bosworth-Toller's Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Online** — https://bosworthtoller.com (Sep 2017 - Present)
  An online version of the Bosworth-Toller's Anglo-Saxon dictionary.
  
  Stack: Laravel, Nuxt.js, MySQL
- **SilentBox** — https://github.com/silencesys/silentbox (Sep 2017 - Present)
  A lightbox inspired Vue.js component.
- **Evaluace** — https://evaluace.ff.cuni.cz/results (Jul 2016 - Present)
  An app for student’s evaluation of lectures and teachers at Charles University.
  
  Stack: Laravel, MySQL, Vue
- **Lipnice Bible** — http://lipnicebible.ff.cuni.cz (Jan 2021 - May 2021)
  Web application presenting the manuscript of the Lipnice Bible.
  
  Stack: Express.js, MongoDB, Nuxt.js
- **Vocabula.lat** — https://vocabula.lat
  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

- What HTR is (and is not) for — leaflet.rocek.dev (Sep 2026) https://leaflet.rocek.dev/3mwoobtc5a22k
- Your vibe-coded app is not sustainable — leaflet.rocek.dev (Jul 2026) https://leaflet.rocek.dev/3mrtbvwebxk2x
- Vibe-Coding in (Digital) Humanities — leaflet.rocek.dev (Mar 2026) https://leaflet.rocek.dev/3mi4nzdt4e22r
- Beyond the Canon: Exploring Overlooked Medieval Texts (2024)
- Bosworth-Toller’s Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Online — Structuring Lexical Data and Digitising Dictionaries (2024) https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004702660_009
- Opuscula - korpus latinských textů z rukopisů Kříže z Telče (2022)
- Výklad snů — Opuscula.Neznámá dílka z rukopisů Kříže z Telče (2022)

## Skills

### Technical
- Artificial Intelligence
- Express.js
- Figma
- Full-Stack Development
- Git
- JavaScript
- Laravel
- Machine Learning
- MongoDB
- Next.js
- Node.js
- Nuxt.js
- PHP
- Python
- React.js
- SQL
- TypeScript
- Vue.js
- Web Development
- WordPress
### Creative
- Adobe Photoshop
- Design
- Digital Illustration
- Logo Design
- Prototyping
- UI Design
- UX Design
- Web Design
### Other
- History
- Medieval History
- Procreate

## Credentials

- Natural Language Processing with Machine Learning — Educative, Inc. (Oct 2022) https://www.educative.io/verify-certificate/lvBQrN9KolouAjz7pZZQKOTgY17oNnKDPfM

## Education

- **Charles University** — Doctor of Philosophy, Medieval and Neo-Latin Studies (Jan 2019 - Jan 2025)
  Thesis: Unraveling the Contaminated Tradition: Medieval Dreambooks in Bohemical Manuscripts
- **Charles University** — Master's degree, General History (Jan 2016 - Jan 2019)
  Thesis: Monsters in Medieval Imagination of British Isles
- **Aberystwyth University** — Erasmus (2018)
- **Charles University** — Bachelor's degree, History (Jan 2012 - Jan 2016)
  Thesis: Dispute over Catholic and Protestant notions of purgatory in the 16th century

## Languages

- Czech (native)
- English (full professional)

## Links

- Behance.net (drawing portfolio): https://www.behance.net/silencesys
- GitHub: https://github.com/silencesys
- ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7802-7252 (verified)