Evan Tann

Programmer and photographer based in Porto, Portugal. Originally from Southern California.

I advocate for open source software and a future without fascism.

Eu falo português também.

Contact

Email

e@evantann.com PGP key (fingerprint

8518 AC2C BB39 788F 67F9 7006 D111 9C19 D159 1E59

)

Signal

Connect

Sourcehut

~egtann

Mastodon

@egtann@mastodon.social

Past Work

I retired from full-time work, but I remain open to interesting projects. Previously I was:

• Engineering Fellow at Gladly: Leading customer service platform with omnichannel AI.
• Co-Founder/CTO at Thankful: AI for customer service. Go+Postgres+Redis stack. Raised $16MM, hired a team of 40, worked with some of the world's biggest brands over seven years. Acquired by Gladly.

I work from first principles and build simple, stable, and secure systems with minimal dependencies that run for years and scale reliably. That's why I:

• Choose the simplest possible architecture. I run code on individual servers and enjoy instantaneous deploys and years without downtime.
• Write code by hand, not with AI. Handwritten code is better than slop, and it's OK to move slower for a better outcome. Take pride in your work, and support others who do.
• Invest in my tools. tmux, vim, and jj offer decades of benefits after an initial time investment.

I mostly write Go and Zig and enjoy experimenting in Scheme.

This server was built in Zig with no heap allocations. The code is licensed under AGPLv3.