Zsolt Molnár

For most of the last decade I've worked either as an employee or as an independent contractor, the latter through Garlic Tech — my one-person studio, still alive. European and American tech companies, mostly on things I'm not allowed to write about. Before that, fifteen-odd years at CERN in Geneva, at a consultancy in Oulu and Helsinki working with the Nordic telecom giants (the sea stayed frozen for most of the year), at Morgan Stanley, McKinsey Digital, GE Healthcare, and a handful of smaller teams I've liked more.

At CERN, in my second stint there, I led a small team of scientists and engineers building the data infrastructure that connected the central facility in Geneva with eleven regional hubs around the world. That work was, by a few degrees of separation, part of what the Higgs boson papers eventually came out of. My background is in theoretical physics; software was the second career, and the one that stuck.

That's the day job.

This site isn't about the day job.

This site is where the other half of my time lives. I've walked the Camino de Santiago, finished the Hungarian National Blue Trail end to end, started a short-lived Hungarian newspaper while living in Geneva, served on the board of the Geneva Hungarian Association, kept trying to write a decent essay, built a few small apps nobody asked for. Right now I'm building a hiking app called Roamr, and experimenting with a few other ideas around AI. I call the method story-based development, which probably says more about the novels I read than about the software I ship.

I'm also, somehow, in the slow business of rural real estate: a patch of land in the Zemplén hills in northeastern Hungary with an unbelievable view, and a small adobe house — a vályogház — in a village called Vilyvitány that I'm about to start restoring. A theoretical physicist and a software engineer walks into a 19th-century mud-brick house; it's going to be fun.