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

Planypus 2.0 launches the fastest way to make plans with your friends

I’m really happy to report that after seven months of hard work, we’re back and better than ever! The new Planypus is an example of beautiful user-driven design, that really focuses on the goal: to make plans as humanly fast as possible.
Not satisfied with the overcomplicated process of making plans at competing websites, we’ve got [...]

Make plans on your phone

Planypus Mobile is now available at http://m.planyp.us – simply log in with your Planypus account from your mobile phone (Opera Mini recommended) and get access to all your plans!

How to hire a visual/interaction designer

Design by committee is a bad idea.
Everyone knows this but few people practice it. There’s an inherent desire to get everyone’s input on the project, especially in a small team. What this leads to is a lot of argument and very little progress.

Especially bad is the idea that team members should give feedback directly to [...]

Tracking down stray console messages in Ruby

While working on Planypus we recently ran into an issue where something was outputting strange messages to the console. Luckily, Anton Mostovoy figured out a clever dynamic Ruby hack to track who was outputting the message:

$stdout.instance_eval do
alias :inner_puts :write
def write (str)
inner_puts %Q!#{str} was said by #{caller.join(“\n”)}!
end
end

Like Magic!