Work on Matej Karolcikhttps://karolcik.com/work/Recent content in Work on Matej KarolcikHugoenTue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000Replacing Algolia with our own vector searchhttps://karolcik.com/work/vector-search/Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://karolcik.com/work/vector-search/JUNIQE’s design search ran on a managed SaaS that could match words but not meaning. I built the service that replaced it — semantic image search in Go, on Qdrant and Postgres.Six years of showing people their design on a thinghttps://karolcik.com/work/preview-pipeline/Sat, 01 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://karolcik.com/work/preview-pipeline/One question — what will this look like printed? — answered five different ways, because a poster, a t-shirt and a shopping-cart thumbnail are not the same problem.Replacing a GPU render farm with CPUshttps://karolcik.com/work/3d-preview-renderer/Mon, 26 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000https://karolcik.com/work/3d-preview-renderer/Product previews were rendered by a single crash-prone GPU instance. I rewrote the renderer in Rust so it would run on ordinary CPU nodes — and scale sideways instead of up.Infrastructure for two shopshttps://karolcik.com/work/two-shops-infrastructure/Wed, 01 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://karolcik.com/work/two-shops-infrastructure/Two e-commerce brands, four environments, one set of Terraform modules. The boring half of backend work, and the half that decides whether the interesting half ships.A load balancer that knows which pod is busyhttps://karolcik.com/work/stateful-load-balancing/Fri, 18 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000https://karolcik.com/work/stateful-load-balancing/Each renderer pod can serve exactly one request at a time. Kubernetes has no idea about that, so I wrote a load balancer that does.