Michal „Urgo“ Kováč

My job is to make sure the teams I look after deliver what we agreed on, and that the reason we agreed on it does not get lost along the way. Priorities are set together with the product owners, but the delivery itself is on me.

During my time at SolarWinds I have been part of migrating the website to a new CMS twice, and I keep automating the annoying repetitive tasks.

CMS migration

The very first year brought an interesting project: moving the company website from Sitecore to Contentstack on a Jamstack architecture. It was not only about content. A new design was going live at the same time and the developers had to make the jump from .NET to React.

A few years later the needs of the business changed, so we migrated the CMS again. This time it was moving content from headless Contentstack to Builder.io. The migration was originally ordered for a narrow set of pages, but the scope grew to the whole site over time and the deadline stayed rather tight. It was a demanding period; I stepped in more visibly and took over planning the complete migration for the other teams in the web development department as well.

Automation

I keep taking away the parts somebody has to do by hand. I mostly use Jira Automation and Power Automate, because it makes the communication between Microsoft products easier. Where possible I work with the developers and testers who build flows in Azure DevOps for triggering tests and releases based on the process in Jira. Jira works as our orchestrator and event tracker.

The broadest role I held at IBM. Besides leading people and coordinating projects across teams of web builders, QA specialists and project managers, I was adjusting the team structure itself to match how the work was changing.

Moving to an agile setup

The team was moving to an agile setup and to a new organizational structure at the same time. I kept adjusting the ceremonies and the way of working to the situation at hand and to how the team members were taking it on. The biggest challenge was how little hands-on agile experience there was, not just on our side but on the management side as well.

Beyond my own team

As a member of the advisory board I could bring work-life improvements directly to the managing director of IBM ISC in Slovakia. As a web centre representative I coordinated several relocations of web teams within the location, around 150 people in total, during office reconstructions. I also led an engagement project for the whole web centre that had its own budget.

When the first line manager was absent for a longer period, I took over his agenda.

The courses that went with it

• IBM Agile Explorer: an introduction to the agile way of working.
• MD002: a development programme for aspiring leaders, closed by exams.
• Assertively into life: assertive behaviour and communication.
• The art of persuasion and negotiation – Negotiation | Human Capital

A supporting role for several smaller teams made up of web delivery leads, web builders and QA specialists, all providing services to internal sponsors. My job was to keep them pointed at shared goals and to coordinate projects between them.

Leading, not giving orders

This role taught me a lot about working with people in leadership positions. I could tell them what to do, or I could lead them to it. I chose the second option. The biggest challenges for me in this position were: Coaching web delivery leads, people who had been in the same seat as me not long before. And escalations: the situations that could no longer be solved inside a team and somebody had to pick up.

The first role where I was responsible for other people’s work. It came down to coordinating a team of web builders and representing them in communication with counterpart teams in Latin America and China.

The measurable part

Team performance was tracked against key indicators: sponsor satisfaction, how often work came back from QA, on-time delivery. I learned that a number without context can do more harm than good.

The rest

I onboarded newcomers and gave the team technical support, which is where my earlier experience as a web builder paid off. During a shortage of project managers I helped run projects outside the main portfolio.

The way into the web world and the start of nine years at IBM. Work in various content management systems, mostly internal IBM tools, and editing company pages in HTML and CSS, with the occasional bit of JavaScript.

Within a few months I took over as technical lead for a newly deployed content management system and stood in for the web delivery lead. From there it was a straight line to what I did for the next eight years.

A year behind the counter in Trnava. The task was to take care of customers and of the cash entrusted to me.

It is the least technical entry on this page and at the same time the first place where I had to talk to strangers every single day. Given where I was with communication back then, that was not a given.

Challenge accepted

The interesting thing about the shop where I worked was that it had two floors. Upstairs there were several shop assistants together. Downstairs there was only one. Both floors had an entrance, so customers had to be watched at both of them. The lower floor was also reserved for the Media Club. At the time it was a new scheme for customers who shopped regularly and collected rewards for it. The work there was demanding and, for some, frustrating. So I swapped places with a colleague who did not like it, and I looked after that “corner” until my very last day. I found out that being responsible on my own was no problem for me and that customers liked me. And, even if in secret, I read a pile of books down there. :)

A master’s degree completed in 2010. The programme was a teaching one, so alongside informatics it was about how to explain a complicated thing to someone hearing it for the first time.

That I now make a living explaining and coordinating is largely down to that combination.

A bachelor’s degree in informatics, finished at the beginning of 2008. This is where the foundation for everything technical I did later comes from: algorithm design, databases and the first websites in HTML, CSS and PHP.

My first real job, still alongside university. Helping with administrative work in the back office and filing payment orders for clients.

The first place where a mistake was not an inconvenience but somebody else’s money in the wrong place. Everything got checked twice, even when it looked right the first time.

By 2026 artificial intelligence is in almost every part of life. Working in IT, I could not avoid it even if I wanted to. But I get along well with technology, so what it stirred up in me was curiosity rather than worry. Before diving into automation and agentic development, I wanted to get a feel for what is commonly available.

Keeping up with the developers at work matters. It is good to know new technologies, and better still to try them. I have worked with the web for most of my working life, so I decided that is where I would put AI to the test: let it help me build a site and then optimise it.

mini-budget

The bigger project I have under way I call mini-budget. It is still in its infancy, but I believe that one day it will replace the old YNAB 4, where I keep the household budget for myself and my family.

A site for the karate club

Besides that web app I built a site for the karate club I train at. It let me try deployment through Netlify from GitHub and content editing in Decap CMS, with Astro as the framework. The result is at arkaratedo-brno.cz.

This CV you are reading came about much the same way.

Something that would once have been unthinkable for me. I write the words, and instead of renting a studio and paying a band, AI generates the music to my brief. The same curiosity that got me into building websites with AI led me here as well. The songs are in Slovak.

• Kam odišla nádej

  3:07

  A very old text from the days when I played Ultima Online. A ballad about an elven prince.

  Watch on YouTube

• Lovec

  2:51

  About a dog. It carries the time while he was with us, and what came after he died.

  Watch on YouTube

• Traja draci malí

  3:07

  A song about my nephews.

  Watch on YouTube

• Domov (industrial metal cover)

  2:44

  A memory of the feelings that came with moving to Brno.

  Watch on YouTube

• Scroogova vianočná mora

  3:59

  A reflection on Dickens and his A Christmas Carol, and on the sheer number of its adaptations.

  Watch on YouTube

• Bledá tvár a čierne vlasy

  4:12

  About a perfect love that never happened, because the two of them never ran into each other.

  Watch on YouTube

• Brawl Stars rodina

  3:34

  About a family playing Brawl Stars. And about the younger generation, its short attention span and strong pull towards rewards.

  Watch on YouTube

• Haiku love

  2:59

  Written on request, about my nephew and his girlfriend. An attempt to fit several haiku into one whole.

• Odznova

  4:33

  About how relentlessly time passes and how the events of our lives keep repeating.

  Watch on YouTube

• Koláč

  2:39

  A recipe for my favourite cake. It was meant to test what a duet can do and how well instructions for alternating voices at different intonations hold up. Many generations later, the result still is not what I had in mind.

  Watch on YouTube

Every once in a while it just grabs me. There is so much technical work around me that I get the urge to spend a moment making something. I do not have much skill, but I make up for it with enthusiasm.

Drawing and vector

I used to make pictures in Photoshop. That was a very long time ago. But every now and then I still draw, just for myself.

At one point I got the idea to draw the people I know as dragons. The drawing alone took a long time and I was never happy with the result. I enjoyed it anyway.

The fun came with turning my drawings into digital ones. Inkscape was a wonderful help with that.

Font

While I was playing around in Inkscape, I realised it would be fun to make my own font. Fun that ended up taking more than 60 hours of actual work. But turning my own handwriting into a font was worth it. Above all, it was fun. I named it Shkrabopis.

After moving to Brno I was looking for movement that would mean something to me. The gym did not appeal to me, and neither did running. But as a fan of martial arts films, mostly the ones from the eighties, I leaned towards martial arts. I was lucky and came across AR KarateDo Brno, a traditional karate club.

I like karate not only as a physical activity, but also as a way of life. I am a disciplined minimalist, and that is exactly what I found in it.

SVB Adam is a small association of the owners of residential and non-residential premises. As chairman, an unpaid volunteer, I was responsible for keeping the building running: arranging services and managing the association’s finances.

Since being elected we insulated the building and steadily fixed a long list of smaller defects in it, on it and around it. All of it on a budget that was always smaller than would have been convenient.

Water and gas

The building was not connected to the municipal networks. It took both water and gas from an agricultural cooperative that owned the infrastructure in the area, on the basis of an unwritten agreement dating back to when the cooperative’s apartment buildings were sold into private ownership.

In 2018 the cooperative billed every customer it had such an agreement with for high arrears it could not document. Ours was one of those buildings. For a small eight-flat house it came to more than €1,000 per flat. After negotiations we got the amount down by half, with a promise of a written agreement.

The following year I negotiated a written contract with the cooperative that laid out the relationship between it and its customers transparently. It held until 2023, when the cooperative broke it without warning: it booked charges outside the agreed terms and wanted to change the contract unilaterally in its own favour.

For the second round I brought in the city of Trnava as a mediator. The cooperative had broken the agreement we had, and since a cut-off of drinking water was on the table as well, the city stepped in, because it guarantees that supply to households. Before I left the post we closed the situation with two moves: water keeps flowing under an agreement supervised by the city, and we disconnected from the gas entirely, replacing it with a tank of our own. The solution was not cheap, but the general meeting agreed that it wanted gas from an official distributor subject to state regulation.

The second round, including collecting quotes and negotiating through city councillors, took over a year. It was the most complicated deal I have ever handled, and not all of its effects were pleasant: the cost of disconnecting from the cooperative’s network, and relations that had been calm until then. What stayed on the plus side is a transparent gas supply, used for heating in winter as well, and clear rules instead of renegotiating the terms over and over.

In life I try to get along with everyone. This was the first time I had to take a very assertive stance.

Somewhere around 2010 I bought myself a slightly better compact camera. There was no grand plan behind it, I only wanted photos that looked better than the ones from a phone. But taking pictures caught me, and I stayed with it for almost ten years.

What I liked shooting most were animals and moments in people’s lives, and not only the lives of people I knew. An animal or a stranger does not pose for you, so all you can do is wait for something to happen. That waiting was probably as much fun as the photos themselves.

I shot a lot and I enjoyed it, and in time I moved from the compact to a DSLR. In 2019, though, I lost the photo muse. I put the DSLR away and have not taken many pictures since.

I came to horses by accident. I played Ultima Online for years and my favourite thing to do in it was taming animals. We could not keep an animal at home, so that is where it stayed, in the game.

After one of the bigger turning points in my life, in 2008 I worked up the courage to walk into a stable in Trnava and ask whether they needed a hand. Not many young men came there to help for free, so the man who ran the stable, and who was the trainer as well, welcomed it.

I started with all kinds of physical work around the stable and later got to the horses themselves. He wanted to return the favour, so he taught me to ride on the horses the stable had.

A few years later the two of us bought a horse whose previous owner wanted to have him put down. His name was Libro, and he stayed my partner for many years after the trainer left the stable. In the end he was mine alone. The taming from the game had turned into something real.

Working with horses taught me a great deal about understanding not only animals but people as well. I still draw on that in leadership today.

The first computer

As a teenager I did not get much time on a computer. My father brought a 386 home from work and we were allowed to play on it only now and then. On top of that I had a bad reputation at home after infecting that very expensive machine with One-half. It fascinated me all the same, so I often played on it in secret, with the risk that if anything at all happened to it, the culprit was obvious.

I got a computer of my own only when work gave my father a Pentium and he passed the 386 on to me. Some time later he got another new machine and the Pentium made its way to me as well. That is where my path into informatics started. I was a gamer, but I equally enjoyed taking the machine apart, looking inside and testing what it could handle. I even infected it on purpose, to find out what a virus actually does and how to get rid of it.

I was usually a generation behind my friends, so I played older games and used older software. When I did at all. When I made my first models in 3D Studio Max, I had no idea what I was doing. I built a model so complex that I could make myself a cup of tea while it turned once around its axis. My friends from Zatwor helped me a lot with all this, and with them came Photoshop and Ultima Online.

Zatwor

Zatwor started as a network between a few guys in a single apartment block. A second block joined, and somewhere around 2000 a third and a fourth. I lived in the fourth one. At that point there were sixteen households of us: the guys, and whoever in the family was let near the computer.

We ran the cables wherever we could and experimented with wireless links as well. The adults shook their heads at us as we threw cables from one apartment block to the next and pulled them through the gaps between the panels.

Zatwor was not only a network, though. To me it was a group of people to chat with. Thanks to them, a broke student with no internet on the network for the first year got access to better hardware, to knowledge about IT and to building a LAN across the estate. Thanks to them I spent my seventeenth year discovering software, computers and everything else that belonged to the tech world at the turn of the millennium. We did not think about the rules, because at that age we did not even know most of them. At seventeen you have no idea what is allowed and what is not, and nobody tells you. I know a great deal more about it today, back then we knew very little.

Internet and Peem

At the beginning of 2002 we chipped in for internet access. It was a wireless link with an antenna on the roof of the block where the first guys lived, and the whole network shared it. It was not cheap, but in that part of town it was the first internet we could get at all.

From that year on, people we did not know started joining us. More blocks and nearby family houses came along until, a few years later, there were at least sixty of us. It was one big LAN on one shared connection, only by then we no longer all knew each other.

Formally we ran as the Zatwor civic association. Later the company Peem took us over, brought in an optical cable and used the structure we had built, rebuilding it only over time. Peem was then bought by Swan.

Ultima Online

With the internet came my addiction to IRC and Ultima Online. It was an experience I do not regret to this day. Without Ultima I would not have discovered that I enjoy leading people, nor my love for animals.

And without that whole period I would have known a fraction of what I knew about technology. It was not study and it was not a plan, it was a hobby I simply enjoyed. Just by playing and taking things apart I learned more about computers than anyone else in our household.