About Zapolu
An engineering practice for teams who care how their software is built.
We work from Prague, for clients across the EU. Much of our work is e-commerce: we build, audit, and operate stores on Magento and Mage-OS and on Shopify (Liquid and Hydrogen). The rest is the systems around it, meaning integrations, infrastructure, and custom TypeScript backends. Our default is the simplest infrastructure that meets the requirement.
What we believe
- Boring technology by default. PostgreSQL unless the workload genuinely demands otherwise; we adopt newer technology where it measurably pays off.
- Substance over polish, but both. Typography and Lighthouse scores matter, and so do deployment safety and an honest readme.
- Reversible deploys, observable systems. Everything we ship comes with monitoring and a rollback path; when something breaks, you want to see it immediately and be able to undo it.
- Everything in writing. Scope, plans, and post-mortems all get written down; decisions that exist only in someone’s memory of a call tend to resurface as problems later.
What we work on
We’re not a generalist agency. The work falls into a few areas:
- Performance and infrastructure for live e-commerce stores
- Platform migrations: Magento 1 to 2 / Mage-OS, WooCommerce to Shopify, legacy custom to modern
- Integration layers between the shop and the rest of the business: ERP, PIM, WMS, payments
- Custom TypeScript backends when the work doesn’t fit a platform
- Fractional CTO engagements for founders who need senior technical judgement without a full-time hire
Full breakdown on the services page, with how we deliver on How we work.
What we don’t do
No pre-decided tenders, no white-label subcontracting, no marketing-pixel work. The full list, with the reasoning behind each refusal, is on What we don’t do.
Who you’re working with
Zapolu is run by Luboš Zápotočný, a software engineer based in Prague and the company’s managing director. He is on the intro call, in the repository, and on the other end of the weekly check-ins.
The company is new; the experience behind it isn’t:
- Ten years in e-commerce engineering. Magento since 2016, from Magento 1 module work through backend development on drmax.cz, one of the largest Czech pharmacy e-shops, to six years as an architect for a Prague agency: performance audits, ERP and external-system integrations, GraphQL extensions, team leading and code reviews, and moving production hosting onto a Dockerized, CI/CD-driven stack.
- Adobe Certified Master – Adobe Commerce Architect, Adobe’s highest Commerce certification, alongside Adobe Certified Professional (Commerce Developer) and Hyvä Certified Associate Developer.
- A master’s degree (Ing.) in theoretical computer science from the Faculty of Information Technology, CTU in Prague.
- Teaching since 2022 at DELTA, a secondary school of informatics in Pardubice: programming classes and theoretical computer science lectures.
The full history is on his LinkedIn profile. The code we publish is on GitHub, and the company is on LinkedIn.
Contact
If this matches the work you need, book an intro call or email info@zapolu.com.