Best on a bigger screen

Sorry — not on phones for now. I promise it’s worth the walk to your laptop or tablet. Open it there for the full experience.

Samuel

Samuel in a black cap and white T-shirt, hand over his mouth, in a gold picture frame. Caption: “this is me, losing it thinking about what to put on this website.”

Hi, I’m Samuel!

This isn’t really a love letter, more like a job application 🤣.. but I believe going the extra mile is what makes exceptional people win.

I started coding in high school, when limited edition sneakers were a big thing, they usually sold out within a few seconds of being released.

I started learning JavaScript to build my own bots that would buy the sneakers I wanted, so I could resell them.

Later I joined my friends to build Ganesh, an automated sneaker bot that was used by over 1,500 other users at its peak and our users purchased more than $30 million worth of sneakers before the hype died down.

Now

I loved reverse-engineering complex apps and APIs, taking them apart until I know exactly how they work.

Funny enough, after building Ganesh, a friend of mine who worked at a big European sneaker retailer asked me to help them build anti-bot protection for their raffle system.

I learned a lot about the backend and how to balance heavy load and concurrency, so things stay fast when traffic spikes.

I work AI-first: I write my own system so my agents like Claude Code, Cursor and Grok bot build in parallel, while I review the running app.

My latest project is Keta AI. I talk more about it in #projects section.

Delivered

A mirror selfie on an iPhone camera screen: Samuel in a steel elevator wearing a cap, headphones, a black hoodie and gray sweatpants, phone raised, a silver suitcase beside him.

Life

I’m based in ParisParis now. I spent the last four years in Los AngelesLA and moved back to Europe earlier this year. I was born in PraguePrague, CZ.

I traveled a lot over the last three years, but I don’t travel much anymore. Flighty is still one of my favorite (and best designed) apps ever, so I pinned my stats from it to the wall.

These days I run more than I fly. I’m part of Founders Running Club in Paris.

PRAHAPRG01 JAN2025DEPARTEDNEW YORKJFKADMITTED08 FEB 2026
WIEN-SCHWECHAT01 JAN 2025ARRIVALVIEDELHIDELDEPARTURE08 FEB 2026DUBAIDXBDEPARTED21 JUL2023SUVARNABHUMIBKKARRIVALLONDON HEATHROWLHRENTRYARRIVALHONG KONGHKGCANCÚNCUNENTRADA
LOS ANGELESADMITTEDLAXSAN FRANCISCOADMITTEDSFO21 JUL 2023DOHA HAMADDOHTRANSITSYDNEYSYDARRIVED

How I use AI

I figured that working AI-first is the best and only way to build in 2026. My “favorite new thing” is Reason Network where I manage agents that work across my MacBook, my Mac Studio and in the cloud.

  • Agents I run

    • Claude Code
    • Grok bot
    • Cursor

  • Skills I install

    • Stageshow (Benji Taylor)
    • jakubkrehel/skills
    • interfaces skills

  • How I review

    • Agentation annotations
    • /better-interface
    • /break

This page was built this way. Flip Blueprint Mode to see the seams.

Projects

I run a small two-person software studio with a close friend, we work on our own projects whenever we have time or think of an idea for something that we or other people could use.

  • Private solvers for DataDome, Akamai and Kasada, which we sold per request, only to scraping services.

    We used to offer these APIs and services on our Discord server.

    • DataDome
    • Akamai
    • Kasada

  • I worked on internal anti-bot protection for Footshop, freelance.

    • Browser fingerprinting
    • TLS fingerprinting
    • Identity checks
    • Rate & velocity checks

  • Where it started: in high school I wrote Ganesh, a bot to buy limited sneaker drops, and it became a product people paid for.

  • An unlimited AI video generator: take a clip’s motion and recast it with your own characters, products or clothes.

Agents, skills, work

  • Agentation
  • Claude Code
  • ChatGPT
  • Notion
  • Raycast
  • Supabase
  • interfaces.dev
  • X
  • Figma
  • Mobbin
  • Grok bot

Claude Code, Grok bot and Cursor are linked peer-to-peer on the Reason Network, so they talk directly, also here’s some of my favorite skills.

npx skills add benjitaylor/skills --skill stageshownpx skills add jakubkrehel/skillsnpx skills add jakubkrehel/make-interfaces-feel-betternpx skills add vercel-labs/next-skills
2,265 contributions in the last yeargithub.com/itemscenter

Inspiration

Why cloro

“We’re building scraping infrastructure. Come help if you like hard problems.”

I quoted this line from your careers page because it stuck with me. I’ve dealt with enough scraping to believe I might be a good fit. When we built Ganesh, the whole project ran on scraping and request automation that mimicked a real browser as closely as possible.

Our users were running tens of thousands of active tasks, monitoring product availability across many sites at once. On JavaScript the app started to freeze, so we moved to Python for multithreading and better performance, then to Go, where every task is a goroutine that costs a few kilobytes and runs across every CPU core, with no GIL in the way.

That’s where I learned how to scrape at scale and push millions of requests through.

The End

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

thanks for reading this far!

Seen