Say Hi to Jakub!

We’re beginning the new year with exciting news: Please join us in welcoming a new addition to the Datawrapper team, Jakub Valenta. He is working three days per week as our vector export developer, filling this position.

Our Custom and Enterprise users already appreciate the ability to download PDFs and SVGs of their charts, maps, and tables to then print them directly:

Today's @latimes features the first web charts shipped to print with no extra production.

No Adobe Illustrator.
No CMYK conversion.
No resizing.

One chart. Two outputs.

It's all thanks to @Datawrapper tech, linked up with our system by @thomas06037 and @LoElebee. pic.twitter.com/gmYkpp4Zag

— Ben Welsh (@palewire) November 28, 2019

Jakub will make sure that Datawrapper visualizations will look the same online and in the exported PDFs and SVGs, no matter what new features we add.

As always, we asked our new team member some questions so that we can all get to know him:

Hi there! Can you please introduce yourself?

Ahoj, my name is Jakub. I was born in Prague where I studied printmaking and conceptual art at the Academy of Fine Arts. I do stuff like designing my own emoji (NSFW) or maintaining a collection of film scenes where people are asked to leave the room.

To build these projects, I code. I’ve been programming since I was a child. It’s super relaxing – especially while wearing a hoodie (I don’t do that in the Datawrapper office^[1]) and while typing on a big loud keyboard (I do that in the office).

I live in Berlin. You can often meet me at various cultural events, lectures, and meetups; in the summer cycling to a lake. When I’m not here I’m probably drinking tea on some Eastern European night train. Simple pleasures.

Why did you want to join Datawrapper?

I’ve had many jobs before, mostly related to web development: internet banking, bitcoin wallet, artworks database… it was all cool but I felt I could do something more beneficial for the society.

So I took my time to look for a new job and was excited to eventually discover a company making a tool for data journalists – Datawrapper. And I was hired, despite coming to the interview with a sticker over my phone camera that I forgot to remove (a sign of the Berlin club scene^[2]).

What will you do at Datawrapper?

I will be working on the print export feature of our charts, maps, and tables. I’m looking forward to setting up a testing system to monitor that all the exported PDFs and SVGs always look perfect and in general to bringing more stability to this part of Datawrapper. I’m naturally a very risk-averse person. It’s a quality terrible for life but handy for developing reliable software.

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Welcome, Jakub! Good to have you here. We’re excited about that testing! You, too, dear reader, would like to work for us? Get in touch with us at jobs@datawrapper.de – we’re always looking. And if you want to learn more about Jakub, visit his website or follow him on Twitter (@kuba100).

1. Jakub assured me he knows nobody in the Datawrapper office has a problem with hoodies. ↩︎

2. Jakub assured me he knows nobody in the Datawrapper office has a problem with people who go clubbing. ↩︎