Meet the team - Franjo Mindek

Wasp team is on a mission to build the world's best full-stack web framework for JS. End-to-end solution and DX of Rails/Laravel, but with JS and your favorite tools. Future-proof and here to stay.

As Wasp usage continues to grow, we're steadily expanding our team to better support our community. Today, we're introducing Franjo, who recently joined us as a framework engineer. Through this interview, you'll get to know more about his background, his perspective on development, and what drew him to contribute to Wasp's mission of simplifying web development.

Let’s start with two truths and a lie about yourself.

1. I’ve tried to build a startup during my university days.
2. I was highly competitive in a niche mod for an old RTS game.
3. I’ve built a graphics engine in C++ with SDL2.

Which statement was the lie above? Any interesting stories to share?

The lie is that I never entirely built my graphics engine, only parts of it. Before diving into computer graphics, I never imagined that simply rendering a triangle could bring so much joy. I managed to implement textures, sprites, animations, and basic camera controls, but eventually, the university took over my life, and I never got around to finishing it.

As for the game, it was the Ultimate Apocalypse mod for Dawn of War: Soulstorm. I realized it had completely taken over my life when Steam showed I had racked up ~38 hours in the past week, right in the middle of my midterms.

I’ve tried to build a startup while I was a student, but failed miserably.

Why did you join Wasp? What did you do before?

I’ve always had an affinity for startups and loved building something from the ground up. My journey naturally trended toward smaller companies where I could have a greater impact.

Before joining Wasp, I had a student job at Neos, a medium-sized fintech company, and later moved to a smaller webdev agency, Pixion. At Pixion, I worked on a few smaller projects in small full-stack teams, which allowed me to make a significant impact early in my career. I enjoyed building something from scratch, but it was frustrating to move on to the next project just as things were taking shape. Over time, I realized that I wanted to fully transition to working on products, preferably in a startup.

One day, I came across an open position at Wasp. Everything looked great—until I saw they were looking for senior software engineers. Still, Wasp seemed like exactly the kind of company I wanted to be part of, so I applied anyway. Beyond the chance to work on a product, I was excited about the opportunity to learn startup know-how and contribute to open source. Fast forward a few weeks, and I got the position!

I’ve held the student booth twice while being a student myself. Once at Neos, and once at Pixion.

What is your favorite language?

That’s a tough question! One thing that keeps me from being fully confident in my answer is that I haven’t explored every language out there, so my favorite might still be waiting to be discovered.

I enjoy statically typed languages, especially those with structural typing. The little experience I’ve had with Go was a lot of fun. Beyond that, a rich type system is a huge plus for me. I love how flexible and freeing TypeScript feels compared to something like C#.

I’ve heard great things about Haskell’s type system, but I haven’t had the chance to dive into it yet, so I’ll hold off on commenting for now.

What are you most excited about in Wasp?

Web development often involves repetitive and boring tasks that are crucial to get right, like security. What I love about Wasp is that I can simply skip those parts, but not just partially—Wasp handles them fully, across both the front end and the back end. It’s an ideal web development framework that lets you focus on what truly matters: your business logic.

Once Wasp reaches stability, prototyping ideas will never be the same again.

What’s a feature or project you’re most proud of that you worked on in the past three months?

Since I recently joined Wasp, I’ll talk about my time at Pixion. We had just three months to build a fully functional prototype from scratch so it could secure funding. It was an exciting but stressful period, especially since our team consisted of just two people, with the other coworker working only part-time.

In the end, I managed to bring the project to completion just before my notice period ended. I’m proud of how much we accomplished in such a short time while still adhering to best practices like Clean Architecture, DDD, Vertical Slice Architecture, and CQRS.

Oh, and yes—it was a C# project. Why do you ask? 😏

How did you start coding?

While I had some early exposure to coding, my real journey didn’t start until university. In primary school, we played around with HTML and FMSLogo. In high school, we were supposed to learn quite a bit, but we switched informatics teachers so often that we never actually covered much.

University was where I finally got the chance to dive into the world of programming. Initially, I wanted to become an AI Engineer or work in Computer Graphics, so I dug deep into mathematics. But then, a single Design Patterns course made me fall in love with software engineering—and I’ve been a software engineer ever since.

Your dev setup?

For most of my life, I worked on Windows. Somewhere during university, I switched to Linux, and it made my dev life so much better. Then, one day, I decided to blindly buy a MacBook, even though I had never used one before. Luckily, the gamble paid off, and I’ve loved developing on MacBook ever since.

My current setup is a MacBook Pro M3 Pro, preferably with an additional external screen. I’ve never really gotten used to traveling and working.

For my tools, I use Homebrew, iTerm2, and Oh My Zsh, along with Rectangle for window management. For web development, Firefox has always had the best dev tools for me.

While I enjoy the ease of macOS, sometimes the lack of customizability irks me.

What is your current favorite gem, library, tool, or anything else that helps you with your work? Why?

I’d like to take this opportunity to give a shout-out to the Tanstack team. Their libraries have significantly improved my web development experience ever since I first tried them out. In the past, when using alternative libraries, I often found myself asking, "Why isn’t X done in Y way?" With Tanstack, that question has come up much less frequently. While it still happens occasionally, it's a vast improvement. I also love that their libraries are framework-agnostic, which adds a lot of flexibility.

One piece of advice you’d give to budding developers?

Don’t be afraid to try different things and switch to what you truly enjoy. I’m eternally grateful for my experimentation period in university, which helped me avoid committing to something I wouldn’t enjoy doing daily.

Also, don’t be afraid to work on something before reading all the docs, articles, and blogs, and watching videos about it. Don’t let the need for endless preparation prevent you from gaining real hands-on experience.

I’m thankful that university allowed me to experiment with various fields of computing. I’ve successfully graduated last year!

Lastly, where can people find or connect with you online?

For now, I’d encourage people to follow me on Twitter. I’m not active on other platforms at the moment. However, you can also find me on the Wasp Discord.