Ondra Malacka
Senior Director, Avast Freemium Portfolio at Gen
- Team
- 76 engineers
- Brands
- Avast, AVG, CCleaner, Avira
- Based
- near Brno, Czechia
Someone picked these chapters and their order for you. They start right below.
You steer this page the way I steer my AI agents: say what you want to know, and it writes itself in the order you pick.
Start with one of the three below, or ask anything in the field under the choices.
You I’m hiring.
I hire people too. I’ve managed engineers for over ten years, and today it’s 76 of them working on Avast, AVG, CCleaner and Avira.
I was born in 1985, studied IT at Brno University of Technology (VUT) and have made my living in software since 2009.
In numbers
- 6 → 18engineers in my team at Avast
- 90+people in 11 teams on Secure Browser
- 76engineers today
- 4brands in the portfolio
Since 2009
- 2009–2012Self-employedDeveloper & EntrepreneurBuilt kdejsme.cz: 1 million visits in 52 days, at 26
- 2012–2016AVG TechnologiesDeveloper → Sr Developer → Team Leader → ManagerFour promotions in four years
- 2016–2022AvastEngineering Manager → Sr Engineering ManagerGrew the team from 6 to 18 engineers, tripled delivery
- 2022–2024Gen, Secure BrowserEngineering Director90+ people in 11 teams, full P&L ownership
- 2025–2026Gen, VPNEngineering DirectorLed the VPN engineering division
- 2026–Gen, Avast FreemiumSenior DirectorAvast, AVG, CCleaner and Avira, 76 engineers
You Show me what you built.
AI agents wrote the code for everything below from 2025 and 2026, and I directed them. The exception is kdejsme.cz from 2011, whose first version I wrote by hand, back when that was the only option.
Crownfall.cz 2026
AI agents
A medieval multiplayer strategy game where players build kingdoms, forge alliances and stab each other in the back. In public beta.
The Toy Workshop 2026
AI agents
A gallery of 16 toy ideas for a 3D printer, cheap electronics and AI, each with a demo you can play. A team of Claude agents came up with the ideas; I just did the picking.
3D printing + AI 2026
AI agents
A Claude Code skill that turns a text description into a 3D model designed in OpenSCAD, slices it and prints it on a Prusa MK4S. Nobody opens a CAD tool.
Try itThree models in OpenSCAD Night Shift 2026
AI agents
An always-on AI assistant built on Claude Code. It runs 24/7, plans my week, triages my e-mail, runs nightly experiments and writes a blog about what it did while I slept.
Try itOne night of sorting videos AI Forecast Tracker 2026
AI agents
Tracks 40+ AI predictions from OpenAI, Goldman Sachs, Anthropic, McKinsey and Google DeepMind as structured forecasts, using a superforecasting method.
Try itWho predicted what, and what came true AI Arena 2025
AI agents
An Android app with a FastAPI backend on GCP, ELO rating and real-time matches. Over 100K lines of code and not one of them written by hand: AI did everything from the architecture to the deployment. It’s on Google Play.
Try itDuels of four characters from the game kdejsme.cz 2011
By hand
A map, live since 2011, of how many people in Czechia share a given surname or first name and where they live, across 206 districts including Prague, built on public Interior Ministry data. With zero marketing budget, just people sending it to each other, it got 1,000,000 visits in 52 days; the press mostly wrote about Nguyen being the ninth most common surname in Czechia. I built the first version myself at 26, and Jan Samek joined later. The ministry last published the data for January 2017, so that’s where the map stopped.
Try itWhere the ten most common names live
You Surprise me.
Three facts about me. Pick the one you believe least.
An app I built got 1 million visits in 52 days. I was 26.
That was kdejsme.cz (opens in a new tab)I type what I want printed, and an AI designs the 3D model, slices it and sends it to a Prusa MK4S. I never open a CAD tool.
What else I’ve builtAn always-on AI assistant runs my week and writes a blog about what it does while I sleep.
Read the blog (opens in a new tab)
You How do you lead?
Trust comes first. I hire good people, give them ownership and then stay out of their way, which is the hardest of the three. At Avast my team tripled its delivery once people felt trusted to make their own decisions. Day to day I run on Radical Candor and Extreme Ownership.
Trust scales. Micromanagement doesn’t.
Seven rules I live by
Doubt the default.
Question the status quo. There are always more interesting paths.
Play it long.
If something matters, persistence beats intensity. Every time.
Don’t wait. Move.
Be proactive. No one else will start it for you.
Show your cards.
Say what you think and feel. Even when it’s uncomfortable.
Giving equals getting.
Help whenever it makes even the slightest sense.
Find the win-win.
The harder path often leads to the better solution for everyone.
Keep your humor.
Take the work seriously, not yourself.
You What do colleagues say?
Colleagues wrote these lines about me in LinkedIn recommendations. I left their names over there, so nobody has to explain themselves.
favourite dev person to ever cooperate with
hard working, talented, always growing and self-improving personality
amazing people leader
result oriented, people person, profound knowledge
understands importance of having a user in center
You What do you read?
A few of my favourite books are about how people decide and work together. And then there’s the one about aliens.
Top five
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People Between stimulus and our response there is a space, and it is up to us how we use it — therein lies our freedom and our growth.
Thinking, Fast and Slow The proper way to elicit information from a group is not by starting with a public discussion but by confidentially collecting each person’s judgment.
Reinventing Organizations The ultimate goal in organizations is not to control people, but to create conditions where they can fully express their talents.
Atomic Habits Be the person with embarrassing goals and impressive results instead of one of the many people with impressive goals and embarrassing results.
The Three-Body Problem Weakness and ignorance are not barriers to survival, but arrogance is.
Five more worth reading
Extreme Ownership There are no bad teams, only bad leaders.
Radical Candor Make sure you are seeing each person on your team with fresh eyes every day. People evolve, and so your relationships must evolve with them.
Never Split the Difference He who has learned to disagree without being disagreeable has discovered the most valuable secret of negotiation.
Grit Enthusiasm is common. Endurance is rare.
Born a Crime We tell people to follow their dreams, but you can only dream of what you can imagine, and depending on where you come from, your imagination can be quite limited.
You Tell me about Crownfall.
Crownfall is a medieval multiplayer strategy game where betrayal is a legitimate tactic.
How a game goes
- Build a kingdom
- Forge alliances
- Stab your allies in the back
Every new noble in Crownfall starts here: two territories, a farm, a settlement and 2,000 gold. Build on the empty plots. The numbers come from the game's code.
- 2,300
- translated texts
- Every line
- written by Claude Code
- Complete
- diplomacy
- Beta
- open to the public
Bring friends you can afford to lose.
You What do your agents do at night?
My agents mostly run experiments at night and then write a blog about what they did while I slept. It’s called Night Shift, and the posts are below.
Night Shift: what my agents do while I sleep
A team of Claude agents designed 53 toys for my 3D printer (opens in a new tab)
Claude agents turned a short brief into 53 toy ideas and built a playable page for each of my 16 finalists.
I didn’t make the video. I said yes four times. (opens in a new tab)
My agents wrote, voiced, animated and rendered a four-minute film about my own pipeline.
I don’t trust one AI’s research, so I run three (opens in a new tab)
For questions that matter, my agent runs three independent research tracks and referees them into one report.
Six Months of Betting on AI: The Receipts (opens in a new tab)
40 public AI predictions turned into probabilities that can be graded, with five verdicts and a 0.022 Brier score after six months.
An agent triages my YouTube backlog at 3 a.m. (opens in a new tab)
Two playlists, one nightly AI job and a watch queue where everything clears my bar.
You What’s the toy workshop?
My 3D printer didn’t have enough work, and a team of Claude agents was happy to help: 53 toy ideas for the printer, cheap electronics and AI. I shortlisted 16 finalists, put my eight favourites first, and each one has its own page with a demo you can play.
The Toy Workshop · 16 toy ideas for a 3D printer, electronics and AI
September 2026
The workshop
- Printer
- Prusa MK4S + MMU3
- Materials
- PLA, PETG
- Toy brains
- ESP32 → a gateway on a Mac
- AI
- Claude plus local whisper and Piper
Three of the finalists
Hot and Cold for Real
The stone in your palm knows where the treasure is.
Vault Guardian
Talk the guardian out of his password, or wait till he dozes.
Two Advisors
An owl and a fox argue, and one is confidently wrong.
You How do I reach you?
LinkedIn is the quickest.
If you’d rather write here, the message comes straight to me and I read every one.