David Grudl

I invent the software that powers a lot of the sites you use every day. I am speaker, trainer and writer.

I'm a software writer, blogger, and who knows what else. I've created popular open source projects Nette Framework, Latte, Tracy, the dibi database layer, Texy, and many more. I started programming in the DOS era, did graphics for a while, also typeset newspapers, and now focus exclusively on PHP & JavaScript web applications.

And when I'm not programming, I write the blog La Trine, which was nominated for a Magnesia Litera award, the professional blog phpFashion, train web development, and run Spartan Races and marathons.

You can also find me on Facebook and Twitter as @davidgrudl and @geekovo.

I want to know much more »

You really want to know more? Okay. I was born in Breclav during the socialist era. My first programming experience was with TNS computers. I graduated from high school, where I became so popular that the teachers celebrated my leaving with a grand party. Then I went to the big city to study. Brno. Occasionally, I worked as a graphic designer in an advertising agency and typeset for the Břeclavsko newspaper.

In 1999 I started a company selling wireless modems and also became interested in web design, as I was stingy to pay $600 to a student to create an e-shop. Creating websites and web applications gradually became my main interest.

In 2004, La Trine, a purely professional blog with an overwhelming majority of non-professional articles, saw the light of day. Originally on the domain dgx.cz, which I sold in 2008 for an outrageous sum to a new owner. Blogging was supposed to teach me how to write better, which didn't happen, but strangely enough, La Trine was one of the most read Czech blogs and even earned a nomination for the Magnesia Litera award. It taught me to tolerate critical and insulting comments from anonymous passers-by.

At the beginning of 2005 I published my first work in the field of open-source, i.e. free, freely distributable programs. It was the Texy! making it easy to write and format text for the web. The library became popular, used by a large number of websites, from blogs to complex e-shops such as Mall.cz. A year later, I published the Dibi database layer, which also found favour with programmers. Another year later came the biggest project yet: Nette Framework.

Unlike the previous libraries, the Nette Framework became popular before anyone saw it. It was officially introduced at the Fall 2007 PHP frameworks conference, and released to the public a few months later. Today, it is one of the most used PHP frameworks in our country, with a number of multinational companies among the references. I list public Nette Framework trainings. A strong community of programmers has formed around the framework, who meet regularly every month at the so-called Posobota.

In 2008 I understood how Twitter works, cut down on blogging and started tweeting as @DavidGrudl. During Microsoft's BUILD 2011 conference I even set up a separate @geekovo account for computer stuff so I wouldn't annoy decent people with it.

In 2010 I moved to Prague and created a website for the President of the Republic Václav Klaus, which runs on the Nette Framework. Throughout its existence it has worked without any hiccups, falling under the unexpected weight of interest only on January 1, when the president announced an amnesty on TV without consulting his web designer beforehand.

In 2013, at the after-party of the WebExpo conference, I tried stand-up for the first time, i.e. standing in front of people with a microphone and entertaining them. It turned out to be orders of magnitude easier than preparing expert lectures, because you just have to talk shit and you don't even have to prepare slides. Despite this realization, I still have something of a respect for stand-up comedians.

In 2016, for some reason, I thought it was a good idea to take part in the crazy Spartan Race, where people wade through mud, climb obstacles and do countless English races, and started training. A year later, at the 27km Spartan Race Beast on the slopes around Jested, I had plenty of time to revise the idea.

A huge challenge and joy was working on the „Hope for Nina“ crowdfunding fundraiser to raise money for the treatment of a little girl affected by spinal muscular atrophy. We did it!

They say that for men, the 40th year of life is marked by 3M (motorcycle, marathon, mistress). They say it right.

To make crowdfunding collections not scarce, I launched one in 2018 to support the development of the Nette Framework.

Photo for download

Projects & Startups

Nette Framework

Nette Framework

A popular tool for creating web applications in PHP. Powerful and understandable tool that satisfies the programmers. It eliminates security risks, honors for AJAX, DRY, KISS, MVC and code reuse.

dibi

dibi

Dibi is a smart and tiny database abstraction library for PHP 5 with very handy API.

Texy

Texy!

Texy is text-to-HTML formatter. It allows you to write structured documents using easy-to-read plain text.

Umeligence

Umeligence

Everything you need to know about artificial intelligence. A guide to the world of AI.

NEON

NEON

NEON is a human friendly data serialization format for programming languages, similar to YAML.

Instagram DavidGrudl

Blog

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phpFashion RSS FEED

Interviews

Talks RSS FEED

Contact

Address

David Grudl
Korunní 2569/108
101 00 Praha

The Czech Republic

E-mail