Who?I’m a software engineer and entrepreneur focused on modern web technologies and AI.
Here's an ongoing autobiography, which also shares the story of my by-the-bootstraps "unschooling" education: now the subject of a chapter on grit and resilience in the bestselling book Mindshift by Barbara Oakley.
An angel investor once described my core soft skill in the role of founder or early team member 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.
In the past, I coined the term "Startup Cities" as co-founder of StartupCities.org and a startup spinoff, both of which focused on why startups should build cities. I now write about Startup Cities at StartupCities.com
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.
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This is my personal portfolio, inspired by the question: "What would the opposite of the two-color template developer blog look like?"
Have fun exploring!
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Contact:hello @ zach.dev
Hacktoberfest
How to Get 120 Euros from the Frankfurt Airport
During a recent flight through the Frankfurt Airport I saw that the airport had a promotion for Oktoberfest. You can win vouchers up to 120 Euro if you win a game of 2048 online.
Game start. No vouchers unlocked.
I played the game a couple of times. But there was something suspicious about how the interaction to 'claim your vouchers' felt. There was nothing about the url or interaction that felt secure.
console spam
I opened the dev tools and sure enough: console spam – the tell-tale sign of someone rushing development.
Checking out the network, you could see requests to an endpoint called '/poke' that seemed to pass along game state.
This looks suspicious...
This, plus the console spam tipped me off that the variable 'lucky'-something was probably floating around in the code somewhere.
And sure enough, the people contracted by the Frankfurt Airport took the path of least resistance and stored the game's state on the window object.
The winning line.
Classic!
A new game, with all vouchers unlocked
And with a one-liner we have a brand new 2048 game... awarding me a 120 Euro voucher.
