zach.dev
StartupCities
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LearnClaude
Spotify CLI
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Claudem Ipsum
Who?I'm a software engineer and product leader focused on modern web technologies and AI.
An angel investor once described my core soft skill as: "The ability to perceive exactly what needs to be done. And then to do it."
My experience working in difficult environments around the world means that I can be trusted to get things done, even when things go wrong.
This website was built by hand, before AI.
Here's an ongoing autobiography, which shares my story of leaving school in 9th grade to join the workforce: now the subject of a chapter on grit and resilience in the bestselling book Mindshift by Barbara Oakley.
I've won several awards for economic research and have been published or interviewed in Virgin Entrepreneur, a16z's Future.com, The Atlantic's CityLab, Foreign Policy, and in academic volumes by Routledge and Palgrave MacMillan.
In a past life, I coined the term "Startup Cities" as co-founder of StartupCities.org in Guatemala City and a startup spinoff, both of which focused on why startups should build cities. This was originally a fringe idea, but has now attracted significant capital and founder interest in the 2020s. I sometimes write about Startup Cities at StartupCities.com
I read and collect obscure memoirs from the history of business and technology. You can find some of them in my public library. Send me your recommendations!
Wait... what is this site?
This is my personal portfolio, inspired by the question: "What would the opposite of the two-color template developer blog look like?"
Click the Start Menu to learn more. Have fun!
Contact:hello @ zach.dev
I'm Bullish on Google AI
The endless OpenAI / Anthropic drama carousel distracts from how Google might be the big winner of the AI race.
Gemini 3.5 Flash is fantastic. It's a seriously smart model and much faster and less annoying than Claude. Token costs on models like Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite are absolutely unbeatable for the performance.
Gemma 4 is America's best open source model. Nano Banana is unrivaled for image gen. Even the new built-in music creator is on par with Suno. Their coding harnesses (Gemini CLI and Antigravity CLI) get better by the week.
For security reasons, I've had multiple clients ask me to exclusively use Gemini as a coding agent and as an AI integration into their products. People trust Google.
Google has a huge hardware arm to build their own chips and lots of practice with data centers. They built TensorFlow. They INVENTED the Transformer!
Google has enormous distribution into businesses and to consumers. They have insane data assets and highly diversified sources of revenue. And they're low drama in the AI race.
The big IPOs overshadow everything. Many people's narratives are stuck in 2022, when ChatGPT seemed to catch Google flat footed. Reality has changed. I'm bullish on Google AI.
