Luka Napotnik

I've been writing software for more than 17 years. Early on it was C, which taught me what computers actually do. Later it was Go, for its simplicity and the way it stays out of your way. I still reach for both.

Backend systems, infrastructure, and the messy kinds of correctness are where I'm at home. Most of my time now goes to people and process, but I keep my hands on real code. If you stop building things, your opinions about building things go stale fast.

Languages I reach for

• Go
• C
• bash
• python
• lua
• awk
• rust

Open source

A few things on github.com/napsy I still maintain or come back to:

• go-css — a CSS parser written in Go.
• git-on-epaper — displays the latest GitLab commit on an e-paper screen.
• findlock — finds Go deadlocks by parsing runtime tracebacks.
• gitw — auto-clones and rebuilds Git repos as they change.
• go-vte — libvte bindings for Go.
• mailassist — an AI email assistant in Go.

Management was the next step. I started with a small team. Today the engineering org includes backend, mobile, frontend, platform, and product engineers, and I work mostly through my leads.

The job is less about writing code and more about removing the things that stop good code from being written. Hiring, planning, budget, vendor decisions, security posture. That's most of the work. In a typical week I run 1:1s and performance reviews, sync with the CTO and the executive team, own KPI reviews and the annual roadmap, negotiate cloud contracts, and make hiring decisions end to end.

Visionect holds ISO 27001:2022 certification, so security runs through most of what I do: access audits, posture reviews, vulnerability management. It sounds dry. In practice it's been useful for treating security as a system rather than a checklist.

Four-day work week

We run a four-day work week at Visionect. I helped put it in place. It's been a quiet experiment in what happens when you trust people to do good work in less time, and so far the answer is that they do. Slovenian media has covered it a couple of times (links under Media). Honestly, the conversation it kicks off is more interesting than the policy itself.

What I believe

• Companies are sports teams, not families. Hire for the team you want to be on. Culture fit matters as much as skill.
• Your team's performance is your performance. There aren't shortcuts.
• Good strategy is rare. Most things called strategy are wishlists.
• Doing something is usually better than doing nothing.
• Plain communication beats polished communication. Write the boring document.

None of these tools are sacred. A bad toolchain taxes every decision you make; a good one mostly stays out of the way.

Cloud & infrastructure

• Google Cloud
• Docker
• Kubernetes
• Terraform
• FinOps

Observability

• ELK
• Grafana
• Prometheus

Coding

• vim
• gdb
• valgrind
• kcachegrind
• VS Code

CI/CD

• GitLab
• GitLab pipelines

AI in engineering

Most of my AI work is about getting teams to actually use these tools well. I use AI daily for both engineering and management work, build internal tooling around it, and made AI fluency a required step in our engineering career ladder.

Agentic coding is where the real change is happening. The model isn't just suggesting completions anymore; it's running tests, fixing its own mistakes, and opening pull requests. Working with that well takes habits most teams haven't built yet, and the teams that build them first will pull away from those that don't.

A lot of my time goes into figuring out what an AI-first engineering team actually looks like in practice: how it hires, how it reviews, what work it takes on, and how the IC role itself shifts when most of the typing is happening somewhere else. It's not a future problem. It's already here.

Articles

Notes on software, management, and whatever I've been thinking about.

• Software Project Management

Talks, podcasts, blog posts, and a couple of audio pieces. Most of the press is Slovenian, and most of it is about the four-day work week.

Talks

• Ljubljana.Tech, April 2026 — Hiring & Beyond: Road to a Productive Engineer. A talk on how I think about hiring and onboarding, and what AI does (and doesn't) change about being a working developer.
• Go Meetup Ljubljana — I've co-organized the local Go meetup off and on over the years, and given a handful of talks there on Go and backend engineering.
• Kiberpipa — a few older lectures from the Ljubljana hacker/maker space.

Podcasts & press

• Ogrodje podcast (Slovenian) — on e-paper and Visionect.
• Visionect Engineering Blog on Substack.
• 24ur.com (Slovenian) — on the four-day work week and focus.
• 24ur.com (Slovenian) — on Friday as a day for rest at Visionect.

Audio