CV
Zan Markan, Developer Relations Leader.
Through my career, I've worked in various roles in or around software engineering and team leadership.
My passion lies in enabling smart people, either through developer relations and community, or more recently - customer engineering. This transcends industries, and is not limited to tech. I'm quite interested in everything relating to strategy, public policy (I'm a massive Europhile), renewables, and anything that involves solving hard problems.
Here's an assortment of what I've been doing over the past decade or so.
I can also provide it in a docx or PDF. To get in touch, check out my About/Contact page.
Experience
Senior Customer Experience Engineer, Ditto
May 2024 - present
Ditto makes tech that enables apps to sync with flaky or non-existent connectivity, serving customers in industries such as retail/Point-of-Sale, airline, and more.
I joined as the first Customer Experience Engineer for the EMEA region, to help customers integrate Ditto into their applications.
Developer Advocate, CircleCI
October 2020 - February 2024
CircleCI is the leading CI/CD platform that enables teams all around the world manage and deliver change in their software projects.
My job is to grow and engage the EMEA developer community, by sharing learning and insights on CI/CD, DevOps, and continuous delivery topics.
Developer Advocate, DataRobot
January 2020 - October 2020
DataRobot is a Boston-based, global enterprise AI company, helping some of the world's leading companies (think financial institutions, airlines, healthcare providers) make day to day intelligent decisions using their data.
My job is to engage and enable our developer users, and raise awareness of DataRobot in wider developer circles. I'm the only person practicing developer relations, and I'm currently focusing on improving our developer experience, and getting folks into our orbit and using our APIs.
Senior Developer Advocate, Pusher
November 2016 - December 2019
Pusher (now a MessageBird company) makes realtime APIs for developers around the world, powering breaking news, trading, messaging, sports betting, and more - for enterprises and startups alike.
I joined as a lead mobile engineer, responsible for our public facing APIs and SDKs. After a year I transitioned into a developer relations role, where I worked as an evangelist, and as a lead manager of the developer relations and community team at the company.
I was in a unique position to focus my efforts wherever it was the most useful for the company at the time - be it building a community, marketing, sales enablement, or product engineering.
Lead Software Engineer, M&S
August 2013 - November 2016
M&S is one of the major retailers and supermarket chains in the UK. I worked on the mobile team of M&S digital, and was responsible for the Android shopping app.
I was the subject matter expert for all things Android, and spent a lot of my time mentoring junior and graduate engineers. I also designed and started a bootcamp programme for graduate engineers (but open to all), where we covered essential software engineering skills, from bash and git mastery to modern test-driven approaches and software testing techniques.
Co-founder, Equaleyes
December 2010 - August 2013
Equaleyes was a startup I co-founded out of university, after returning from the global finals of Microsoft Imagine Cup in 2011.
We were building an accessible smartphone based on Android, and I worked as a software developer, accessible UX designer, and many other things that a startup co-founder does.
We parted ways after the company pivoted into a digital agency.
Education
B.En. Informatics & Communication Technology (ICT)
University of Maribor, 2007-2010
M.En. Computer Science
University of Maribor, 2010 - (not finished)