Radio Free

December 31, 2024 was my last day at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. I joined the company in February 2018 as a Data/Visual Journalist and quit as a Director of Digital Innovation.

The whole experience can be summed up in a short satirical headline: “From KAFKA to Václav: Seven Years of Resistance to the Fitzcong Regime.”

A big thank you to all my bosses Glenn, Nick, Tolkun, Konstantin, and Patrick for the exciting experience, your trust, and your support.

Thanks to all my former colleagues for your creativity, passion, and collaboration. Back in November 2019, we experimented with facial recognition using OpenCV and MTCNN, training our own models on photos of a young Volodymyr Zelensky:

Together, and despite internal bureaucratic resistance, we have created remarkable products that I am proud of:

The KAFKA Toolkit for better storytelling
Autonomous COVID-19 maps for over 20 languages
BypassRoskomnadzorBundle to make our reporting accessible in Russia during the war
The Václav Project — an AI-powered service for fast news gathering, transcription, and translation

In August 2024, I decided to leave RFE and focus on my own ventures: Newsroom Toolkit, internet freedom and censorship circumvention solutions, and business intelligence platform in Kyrgyz Republic.

The article was first published on my LinkedIn.

Radio FreeFrom KAFKA to Václav: Seven Years of Resistance to the Fitzcong Regime