# Zan Markan (@zan.markan.me)

Profile: https://sifa.id/p/zan.markan.me
Headline: Building Potniq to help you stop ‘Airport Buffering’ and start reclaiming your mornings.

## About

Software builder, enabler and advocate for engineers, turned maker of business travel tools. By day, I help teams build edge-distributed systems that work offline, even at 35,000 ft. By night, I am building Potniq. A decade of business travel, terminal anxiety, and refreshing Google Maps every 30 seconds will do that to a person. I needed something to tell me when to leave. So I made it.

Join me on the journey: potniq.com

## Experience

- **Founder at Potniq** (2025 – present)
  \- Building a business travel optimization tool from 0-1: solving the "ground journey" problem for travellers navigating meetings, connections, and real-time logistics
  \- Designed data model and system architecture for multi-source travel intelligence
  \- Fully automated marketing and DevOps pipelines using agentic AI technologies
  \- Hands-on laboratory for cutting-edge AI tooling while shipping a real product
- **Senior Developer Advocate at CircleCI** (2022 – 2024)
  \- Created hands-on technical workshops driving measurable sign-ups, feature adoption, and Champions program growth
  \- Helped design a conference playbook that enabled EMEA to outperform other regions 3-4x in lead generation
  \- Launched speaker enablement program for engineers: topic ideation through presentation delivery
  \- Converted detractors into advocates through direct problem-solving and internal product advocacy
  \- Closed the feedback loop: gathered community insights and shepherded them through to shipped features
- **Lead Mobile Engineer at Pusher 🚀** (2016 – 2017)
- **Software Engineer at Marks and Spencer** (2013 – 2015)
- **System Administrator at Freelance** (2007 – 2011)
- **Developer Advocate at CircleCI** (2020 – 2022)
- **Developer Evangelist at Pusher** (2017 – 2019)
- **Developer Advocate at DataRobot** (2020 – 2020)
  \- Acted as the Developer Persona Owner
  \- Built the developer portal from scratch: tutorials, samples, and curated community forum
  \- Created demo applications showing AI/ML integration in practice — bridging data science and software development
  \- Authored educational content that made machine learning accessible to traditional developers
  \- Managed public GitHub organisation, enabling data scientists to publish and share their work
- **Senior Customer Experience Engineer at Ditto** (2024 – 2026)
  \- Primary Solutions Architect and implementation engineer for enterprise customers across airline, restaurant, retail, and cruise line industries
  \- Designed complete data models, edge-to-edge, and edge-to-server architectures for production systems handling offline-first, distributed workloads
  \- Led MongoDB Realm migration projects end-to-end: solution design, infrastructure scaling, and production deployment
  \- Created Ditto University curriculum — self-paced educational material including novel formats like graphic novel-style articles on distributed systems
  \- Designed and delivered technical enablement workshops that helped customers ship to production on time
  \- Maintained observability tooling for Ditto's SDK libraries
- **Senior Developer Advocate - DevRel Leader at Pusher** (2019 – 2019)
  \- Led Developer Relations team: direct reports, freelancers, and outreach programs
  \- Spearheaded "State of Kotlin" survey (2018) — first large-scale survey of Kotlin language adoption
  \- Built and maintained open-source web/mobile SDKs; owned developer experience and documentation
  \- Founded and hosted developer meetups for developers building developer tools
- **Software Engineer - Android technical lead at Marks and Spencer** (2015 – 2016)
  \- Led the team that built M&S's first internally developed Android retail application
  \- Created internal engineering bootcamp that upskilled graduate and junior developers on software engineering best practices
  \- Co-authored incident management process and on-call protocols for mobile applications — establishing operational maturity for a new platform
  \- Advising the wider company on Android and mobile development topics.
- **Co-Founder at Equaleyes** (2011 – 2013)
  Co-founded Equaleyes as a startup building mobile experiences for the blind and visually impaired, then pivoted into a digital agency.
  \- Developed accessibility software suite for visually impaired Android users.
  \- Built the first truly accessible home screen for Android devices in 2011
  \- Microsoft Imagine Cup 2011 global finalist — top 8 teams worldwide
  \- Secured seed funding and joined Telefónica Wayra accelerator in London
- **Senior Customer Success Engineer at Confidence by Spotify** (2026 – present)
  I help product teams adopt and experiment successfully with Spotify's experimentation platform, Confidence. 

## Education

- **University of Maribor** — B.En. (2007 – 2010)

## Skills

- Workshop Development
- Mentoring
- Incident Management
- Mobile Application Development
- User Experience Design (UED)
- Fundraising
- Community Management
- Hiring
- Viral Marketing
- persona owner
- AI/ML
- Data Science
- Automated Machine Learning (AutoML)
- Conference Speaking
- Solution Architecture
- Enterprise Architecture
- Data Modeling
- Distributed Systems
- Stakeholder Management
- Systems Design
- Developer Relations
- Product Management
- System Architecture
- Product Launch
- Start-up Leadership
- User Experience (UX)
- Product Development
- Android
- Linux
- MySQL
- Java
- Team Leadership
- Ruby
- RXJava
- Test Driven Development
- Cloud Computing
- Project Management
- Project Planning
- Strategic Planning
- XML
- SQL
- Accessibility
- Teaching
- Windows
- Team Building
- Security
- Research
- HTML
- ActionScript
- JavaScript
- Git
- Analytics
- Continuous Integration
- APIs
- API Development
- JSON
- Web Development
- Software Development
- PHP
- PHP Applications
- COBOL II
- PHPUnit
- PHP Frameworks
- developer advocacy

## Certifications

- DataRobot Essentials — DataRobot

## Projects

- **Groundwork by Potniq**
  City transit insights

## Languages

- English (native)
- German (limited_working)
- Serbian (professional_working)
- Croatian (professional_working)
- Slovenian (native)

## Other profiles

- github: https://github.com/zmarkan
- linkedin: https://linkedin.com/in/zmarkan
- website: https://potniq.com
- website: https://markan.me