Life, thoughts, and workings of Zan

The Right to Remote

Remote work should be a human right for every citizen of the EU. This article covers the benefits, challenges, and opportunities.

DevRel Life

The Delight of Development ✨

I love software development. You might agree if you also work in the software industry. Have you ever thought about why, though? In this article I explore what has drawn me towards development throughout my career, and kept me engaged all these this time.

Thought Leadership

How I write: Start with a Series of Sincere Sentences

An introduction to my preferred writing technique. It has helped me write blog posts, technical documentation, conference talks, and everything in between.

Thought Leadership

Podcast - Craft Beer Chat with Tech Travel Geeks 🍻

Last night I had the pleasure to participate as a guest on a podcast by my friend Matteo Doni of Tech Travel Geeks, talking about one of my passions - Craft Beer. We had a lovely chat with Alana Harris and Matteo - all from our respective cities and countries

Thought Leadership

Why I believe in the brave new world of serverless

Serverless is one of the most promising technologies of the modern web. It's making programming more accessible to new generations, and serves as the glue between many parts of the web.

DevRel Life

A Day in the Life (of a Developer Avocado 🥑)

A day in my life as a developer relations person, cca early 2019.

DevRel Life

Developer Relations is Developer Enablement

Developer relations is many things to many people and organisations. There are many styles for how to practice. Yet, at its core, it's all about enabling developers.

DevRel Life

My DevRel Year Zero

This blogpost was originally published on my DevRel Medium blog. Back in November 2017 I moved from full time software engineering work and started working as a developer evangelist. As this was just about a year ago, I decided to write this post as a retrospective of sorts on how

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BrewDog IPA API

A little API that lets you query BrewDog’s bars, their opening times, and what beers they have on tap. You can try it out at api.ipa-api.net/brewdog/bars, get individual bar details at api.ipa-api.net/brewdog/bars/9998 - for London Angel pub, or find out

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The State of Kotlin

A survey on the Kotlin programming language, and an associated report. A project we ran at Pusher to learn about Kotlin’s adoption, it’s usage, and what developers think about it. We had 2,744 respondents in total, and produced a swanky little website for it. Find it at

DevRel Life

The art of the (conference talk) proposal

My process for writing proposals to speak at conferences. It can be more systematic than you might think.

DevRel Life

(2017) - A year of talks, conferencing, and meeting up

A writeup of my year 2017, when I took my public speaking and writing to the next level. I also moved from being primarily a developer to being a developer evangelist, getting my formal start in developer relations. I learned a ton, and set some goals.

DevRel Life

DevRelCon 2017 Writeup

This was originally published on my DevRel Medium blog. On Wednesday 6 December I attended the annual DevRelCon London — a conference for people working in developer relations, developer experience, and related fields. I met lots of people, gained tons of insight, and over all had a great day. I also

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Making a live bitcoin price notification on Android

I wrote a tutorial on how to make a live notification on Android, similar to what the excellent Guardian Mobile Lab did for their US election experiment. You can read more about it on Pusher’s blog: https://blog.pusher.com/making-live-notifications-for-android-using-pusher/ Happy pushing!

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A rather meta Kickstarter idea

I just backed the book Attaché guide to travel on Kickstarter. It’s a project by Alex Hunter, maker of the excellent Attaché Travel show on YouTube. Attaché is a travel show aimed at a modern jet setter, focusing on the essentials to get around in a new city. It

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How to properly watch Node and TypeScript apps 👀

I’m really liking Node, especially as a prototyping tool. It’s just incredibly fast to hack something together that kind of works. My preferred language to work with it is TypeScript, because types. When prototyping it’s very common to do a lot of rebuilding and observing changes -

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I like JavaScript now

If someone told me a year ago that I’d be saying praises to JavaScript I’d probably choke on laughter. It’s mid 2017 now and I’m saying praises to JavaScript. All it took was using it for a while. Here’s a few of my reasons why

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How to get a half decent seat on EasyJet without the $$$

Budget airlines use an army of dark UX patterns aimed at robbing you of your hard earned $$$s, £££s, and €€€s after you’ve bought your ticket. Luckily, you can use some of their tools to your advantage. I discovered a way to get premium seats without paying any extra

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Goodbye, Ghost Pro! Hello, Jekyll!

Hello, 🌍! I’ve decided to move my content and all my future writing under my personal domain and start using a new (old) blogging engine. For a while now, I’ve been using Ghost Pro to run my site, geniously titled Space Cowboy Rocket Company (dot com). It’s worked

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Asus C302 - a rather biased review

So I got myself a new toy computer, a Chromebook to be precise. It’s my first non Macbook computer in 5 years. Hardware-wise I’m a massive Mac fan, but hardly use any Apple services or software products, apart from the OS and a few apps. Instead I’m

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Rant about the state of presentation software for developers

I’ve been doing a few talks here and there over the last few years, and want to ramp it up even more. But apart sending the talk proposal and getting it accepted by a conference or a Meetup, and from going on stage and talking about that topic, you

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Bye @mandsdigital, it's been totes emosh!

This is not your average quit lit post. Back in August 2013 I got a job. A proper one, not the startup shenanigans. Yesterday I returned my pass and laptop and left the office for one final time. I stayed there for 3 years and a few months, never thought

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Divide and conquer your Android modules with Artifactory

In this article I’ll cover the easiest way to roll your own maven repository for hosting private libraries. This will allow you to make faster, more reproducible builds. We’ll use a tool called Artifactory and install it on AWS’s Elastic Beanstalk service. To finish, we’ll take

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Cooking up clean architecture on Android (talk writeup)

I just got back from the lovely mediteranean shores of Tel Aviv, where I gave this talk. The slides, as well as a writeup of the talk itself are below. But first, let’s mention the event itself. Codemotion - the venue, the setupCodemotion is a developer conference (network?) that

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Testing it & Loving it @ Big Android BBQ Amsterdam

I recently delivered a talk on the first Big Android BBQ this side of the pond. Unfortunately it wasn’t recorded, but the slides are available on Speakerdeck. In short, it covers different testing techniques, and why I like it so much and think you should too.

Zan Markan