About Me
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
Ahmad hamza:
May 21st, 2012 at 9:15 pm
Sir,
I ve passed engineering in IT this year with 50%. Sir i ve done my final year project in HCI (Human computer interface) domain on the topic “Heuristic evaluation of Video Camera”. Ive designed a web based tool in rails for this project which will evaluate any video camera according to its usage. I am also very much interested in photography. Sir, i want to choose my career in photography (mixture of Engineering and photography). Sir please help me as i m very much confused. Right now i ll be applying for internship at Better labs. After which ill do job for atleast 2 years. Sir it will be very much helpful for me. Thanks.
Chad LaVallie:
May 24th, 2012 at 8:44 pm
Hi Yan,
This is Chad LaVallie with AT&T. Our Innovation Team in Palo Alto noticed your blog and wanted to see if you were entertaining other opportunities. We have a unique part of our company called the Foundry which operates like a start-up, focusing on UX and new prod dev in an open source environment. Here is a short clip that gives a snapshot of the team: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60XEzHT7bgs
If interested, please let me know and we can discuss for a few minutes.
Thanks much,
Chad LaVallie
Gabe Ferreira:
May 13th, 2013 at 10:52 am
Hey Yan,
I found you on Linkedin. I’m wondering if you would be interested in discussing some opportunities at Instructure? You can check out our open source product on github.com/instructure.
Thanks!