Silvan Jegen
Senior Software Engineer at Smallpdf
Basel, Basel-City, Switzerland
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSilvan Jegen is a Senior Software Engineer based in Basel with 14 years of experience building reliable backend systems and cloud automation. At Smallpdf since 2017 he shapes production-grade services while drawing on earlier roles at Novartis where he bridged computational linguistics and service management. A pragmatic open-source contributor, he’s improved core tooling—from a vi-like editor (vis) to the bleve search library and the OpenXcom game clone—often focusing on parser/tokenization, build reliability, and undo/command semantics. He also brings hands-on cloud and infrastructure expertise, hardening AWS spot-instance automation and launch configurations for AutoScaling workflows. Trained in Japanese studies and computational linguistics at the University of Zurich, he combines language-aware engineering with systems-level thinking that surfaces in nuanced tokenizer and parsing contributions.
14 years of coding experience
2 years of employment as a software developer
Licentiate, Japanese Studies, Linguistics, Computational Linguistics, Licentiate, Japanese Studies, Linguistics, Computational Linguistics at University of Zurich
German, English, Japanese, French
Github Skills (39)
ec10
autoscaling10
tokenize10
xcs10
c-language10
openx10
game-engine10
text-editor10
xcos10
testing10
xcomponent10
modals10
xcp10
indexing10
c1110
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
blevesearch/bleve
Sep 2014 - Oct 2016
A modern text/numeric/geo-spatial/vector indexing library for go
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:21 commits, 8 PRs, 24 comments in 2 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Silvan primarily contributed to the `bleve` search library by implementing and testing features related to Japanese language tokenization. Their work included adding the Kagome tokenizer, writing tests to validate its functionality, and optimizing the code by using byte positions instead of character positions. Additionally, the user refactored the codebase, making various improvements, such as removing unnecessary clauses, and addressing code style issues.
golangtext-indexingindexing
martanne/vis
May 2015 - May 2016
A vi-like editor based on Plan 9's structural regular expressions
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:2 reviews, 9 commits, 7 PRs in 1 year
Contributions summary:Silvan contributed to the core functionality of the `vis` editor by modifying the command parsing and execution logic. They improved the handling of command-line arguments and enhanced the command completion feature for file names. Furthermore, the user addressed a bug in the undo operation, refactoring the code to prevent unwanted snapshot creation. They also made changes to the configuration by implementing Vim-like keybindings.
luastructural-regexregular-expressionsplanmodal-editing
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