Phil Pelanne
Director of Technology
After graduating from William and Mary with a B.S. in physics, Phil started as NewCity’s lone developer back in 1998.
He was in charge of two web servers: one running Mac OS 8 and the other rocking Windows NT 4, both sitting within our office. We had a web-connected fax machine that we could connect to your contact forms (ha!).
Today Phil builds and deploys all kinds of customized publishing platforms across the web for a wide variety of awesome clients. His work chiefly involves technical architecture planning, back-end development, implementing data migrations, and stewarding site launches. He especially likes to optimize sites for speed, caching everything, and squeezing out extra milliseconds per connection for a net savings that adds to our clients’ website retention and increased user engagement. He’s also obsessed with finding ways to do the largest amount of useful stuff with the fewest keystrokes — AUTOMATE ALL THE THINGS! Continuous integration and deployment brings him joy.
Internally, Phil manages our development team, looking for opportunities for our developers to stay on the cutting edge in whatever facet of development they excel at. He helps us work across teams by making sure development is working as efficiently as it can with UX, Content, Design, and our marketing team.
Outside of work Phil chills with his small but awesome family in the verdant and occasionally windy hills of Blacksburg, VA, playing various stringed instruments and exploring the mysteries of fermented beverages. If you ever want to go camping, he is down.
For Phil, the best part of development is that it’s in never-ending flux — what he'll be doing two years from now is vastly different from what he's doing today. Part of his job is to try to steer the company towards the best technologies to accomplish both our and our clients’ needs, and luckily he finds that pretty fun to do.
