Michal Čihař
Founder at Gammu
Cvikov, Liberec, Czechia
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top School
Top expert inEnterprise Web Solutions Development
Michal Čihař is a libre software founder and engineer with 23 years of experience building and maintaining open-source tooling, best known for founding the Weblate localization platform and long-term contributions to projects like phpMyAdmin, Debian and the translate toolkit. Based in Czechia, he combines deep backend and DevOps expertise—spanning Python, PHP, packaging and Docker—with hands-on localization and internationalization work, including nuanced handling of Android XML resources and plurals. He has led projects from low-level protocol reverse-engineering at Gammu to infrastructure roles at Braiins and SUSE, and still maintains critical services such as phpMyAdmin’s demo site and theme release automation. A pragmatic problem-solver, Michal often improves interoperability and stability across ecosystems (e.g., authentication libraries and Home Assistant integrations) while preserving user privacy and maintainability.
23 years of coding experience
20 years of employment as a software developer
Ing., Computer science, Ing., Computer science at Czech Technical University in PragueGymnázium VoděradskáGutovka
Czech, English, German
Stackoverflow
9,976reputation
1.3mreached
243answers
8questions
mysql
top-5%
git
top-5%
phpmyadmin
top-5%
localization
top-5%
linux
top-5%
django
top-5%
Github Skills (83)
authorizations10
restructuredtext10
python10
testing10
command-line-interface10
authentication10
ruby10
social-authentication10
backend10
django10
mqtt10
internationalization10
rs10
dockers10
localization10
Programming languages (35)
Github contributions (5)
phpmyadmin/docker
Dec 2015 - Sep 2018
Docker container for phpMyAdmin
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:279 commits, 68 PRs, 196 pushes in 2 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Michal focused on improving the phpMyAdmin Docker container's functionality and maintainability. They implemented enhancements such as generating random blowfish secrets, supporting environment variables for MySQL server configuration, and adding persistent volume support for sessions. Additionally, the user integrated nginx and php-fpm for improved performance and also enhanced testing by adding a new testing script. They also made several adjustments to testing, deployment, and configuration files.
mariadb-serverphpdockerphpmyadmindocker-container
phpmyadmin/phpmyadmin
Aug 2002 - Aug 2019
A web interface for MySQL and MariaDB
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:16490 commits, 482 PRs, 2405 pushes in 17 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Michal primarily contributed to improving the code quality, fixing coding style issues, and adding functionality to the phpMyAdmin backend. The commits focused on addressing bugs and enhancing the codebase through changes to various PHP classes, including those related to console and table structure. They also performed refactoring and bug fixing related to SQL query operations, ensuring improved stability and performance. Furthermore, the user made improvements to the build and documentation.
mysqlweb-interfaceweb-appphpdatabase
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