Yan Pritzker photographer, entrepreneur, software engineer, musician, skier

I am an entrepreneurial technical generalist, specializing in founder/first-employee level technology and business development. My work has run the gamut from running my own startup, managing in house and outsourced developers and designers, doing product development, sales, biz dev, and marketing, developing distributed enterprise J2EE applications, database design, developing large full stack Rails applications including operational aspects, and user experience design. I have helped set up coding standards, led several team transitions from svn to git, and done hiring oversight. Things that I really like: macs, git, vim, great interaction design, marketing, customer service, and behavioral economics.

I have been active in the software industry for 15 years, starting from leading a successful effort to build an open source quantum computing simulator while in high school, working on next generation semantic web technology at IBM’s Extreme Blue program, and building a distributed messaging system for an airline reservations system at G2 Switchworks. I hold degrees in Computer Science and Linguistics from UIUC. You can find me on LinkedIn.

I am currently a senior engineer at Crowdcast, a business intelligence tool that gets you more accurate forecasts by polling team members and aggregating crowd wisdom. As in any startup, I wear many hats, from backend engineering, to user experience, to dabbling in ops.

In 2006, I founded Planypus, a place to share plans with your friends, where I acted as CEO and director of development for six years while simultaneously holding a full time job as one of the first employees at CohesiveFT where I was primarily responsible for the web side of the Elastic Server On-Demand product, a virtualization factory that lets you easily produce virtualization ready and cloud ready servers from a component library.

I also love music, play guitar, starting to play piano, and love to travel and take lots of photos.

My Projects

• YADR – Yet Another Dotfile Repo (author)
• Git Workflows Book (author)
• MissionClick – a SF Mission focused event list (founder, lead dev)
• Planypus – collaborative event planner (founder/ceo/lead dev)
• ElasticServer (first employee/lead dev)
• All my github projects, vim plugins, etc