Where Roots Meet Code
Antonín Figueroa
First post
Technology · Nature · Community
There's a moment I keep returning to. Standing barefoot in a field in Vlkaneč, a small village in the Czech highlands, watching a cows chew grass with absolute philosophical indifference — and then feeling my phone buzz with a GitHub notification.
Two worlds, one body. That tension is what this blog is about.
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01
Who I Am
My name is Antonín Figueroa. I'm a software developer, content creator, volunteer based in the Czech Republic, a long-time volunteer at an animal sanctuary called Nech mě růst (which roughly translates to Let Me Grow), and a member of ČSOP — the Czech Union for Nature Conservation.
I spend my days writing code. I spend a growing portion of my life in the dirt, among animals, and in community with people who believe that the pace of modern life has taken us somewhere we didn't consciously choose to go.
Rooted in Code is the space where I try to make sense of both.
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02
The Meadow That Changes Everything
Nech mě růst didn't start as a project. It started as a pull — a feeling that something important was missing from the way we live.
It's a community and animal sanctuary in Vlkaneč, a quiet village near Čáslav in the Vysočina region. Over 100 animals — rescued, rehomed, living out their lives in peace. We organize walks with the animals through the surrounding landscape, self-development gatherings, meditation events, and tea ceremonies. The work is physical and unglamorous: feeding, building, organizing. But it's also deeply communal — the kind of community that forms around a shared place, not a shared opinion.
Standing in the meadow on a quiet morning, surrounded by animals who have nowhere else to be, something in the nervous system settles. The kind of settling that no productivity tool has ever managed to replicate. The grass, the light, the particular silence of a place that has decided to be peaceful — it recalibrates something.
None of the apps and platforms I spend my days with have ever made me feel what that meadow makes me feel. We don't actually need any of it.
The philosophical backbone draws from the idea of the rodový statek — the ancestral homestead — a concept explored in Vladimir Megré's Anastasia series. The core idea: that humans thrive when they have a deep, intentional relationship with a specific piece of land. That belonging somewhere is not just poetic — it's biological.
We're working toward that. Buying land, building community, creating something lasting. And the technology, if it's any good, should accelerate that return to simplicity — not delay it.
Alongside the sanctuary, I'm a member of ČSOP — the Czech Union for Nature Conservation (Český svaz ochránců přírody), specifically the Trosečníci Ostrov chapter. Conservation work at this level is rarely dramatic. It's consistent, local, patient. It taught me something that good software development also demands: meaningful change accumulates quietly, in small decisions, over time.
These two commitments — the sanctuary and the conservation work — are not hobbies. They are the root system. Everything else grows from there.
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03
What I Build
I approach technology the same way I approach the meadow: with the question what does this actually serve? Right now I'm working on two projects still taking shape:
🔶Pěstuj
Cultivate · In development
Something big is growing here. I can't say much yet — but the vision is ambitious and the direction is clear. It lives at the intersection of nature, community, and technology. More soon.
🔶Impactly
Social impact · Early stage
An attempt to answer a question I keep asking myself: what would tools look like if they were designed around social and environmental impact from the ground up? Not as an afterthought, not as a feature — but as the whole point. The scope of what this could become is wide. It's still in its early chapters.
The thread connecting both: technology that makes space for something more human. Not automation for its own sake. Not apps that extract attention. Tools that free you up to be more present, not less.
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04
A Note on How I Work
In the last period, something shifted in how I relate to technology day-to-day. I've been working extensively with Claude Code (and many others tools) — an AI-powered coding environment — and it's genuinely changed the pace at which I can handle the digital side of the sanctuary and the nonprofit work around it.
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For the first time, the gap between what I want to build for Nech mě růst and what I can actually ship has started to close. Website updates, automations, small tools that used to take days now take hours. That matters when you're one person wearing many hats.
But here's the paradox I sit with: the better the tools get, the more I feel the pull toward the field. The sheep Pogo doesn't care about my deploy pipeline. The grass grows without a roadmap. There's a lesson in that I'm still learning.
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05
What This Blog Will Be
I'm not here to write crypto price predictions or DeFi tutorials — though I find the underlying ideas fascinating. Decentralized systems, ownership, trust without intermediaries — all of that maps onto questions I think about in the context of community and land.
What I'll actually explore here:
🔸Building things that matter
Developing software with a social or environmental mission — including the messy parts.
🔸Technology and the natural world
AI for ecological monitoring, tools for growers and conservationists, the question of what tech is actually for.
🔸The inner dimension
Personal growth, the philosophy of the rodový statek, why reconnecting with nature isn't just a hobby — it's a practice.
🔸The honest middle
I'm not anti-tech and I'm not a utopian. I carry a laptop into the forest. I want to explore what it means to do that intentionally.
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06
Why Publish0x
Because I believe in systems that distribute value differently. Blockchain isn't the point — but the idea that readers can support writing without a subscription wall, and that creators can build without algorithmic gatekeepers, resonates with what I'm trying to do elsewhere in my life.
I'm curious to write for an audience that already thinks in systems, in decentralization, in alternatives. That's a good starting point for these conversations.
If you've ever felt the pull between your screen and the soil — between the efficiency of code and the chaos of something alive — you're in the right place.
And if part of you suspects that we'll eventually set all of this down and go back to something quieter — you're probably not wrong. But until then, let's at least make the tools worth having.
Welcome to Rooted in Code.
➖Antonín aka Tony
Let's think this through together.
If any of this resonates — or contradicts something you believe — drop a comment. What's your version of the meadow? What are you building, and why? Are you finding ways to make technology serve the things that actually matter to you?
These questions are more interesting in dialogue than in monologue. I genuinely believe the people drawn to questions like these are exactly the ones worth thinking alongside.
