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.
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?"
Have fun exploring!
Click the Start Menu to learn more.
Contact:hello @ zach.dev
Long Form Writing
I've been working on a long-form writing project for the last 1.5 months. What it's driven home is how mundane the 'creative process' actually is.
Everyone wants fireworks and special hacks. Me too! But it just boils down to staring at a blank page for many hours on a regular basis.
My routine is to write from 5:30AM to 8:30AM.
What's interesting is how this constancy makes your brain feel like a computational system. You load it with the relevant data and let it mull it over in a background process.
I will be completely confused on Day 1. Day 2 I have a vague intuition of a resolution. Day 3 it all comes bursting forth.
Creatives from an earlier time talk about how you "can't cheat the muse". It seems true.
The "muse" is the sort of gestalt/phase shift synthesis of confusing data and intuitions that bubbles up with enough perseverance.
This experience also describes how programming so often feels. You alternate between:
- Conscious struggling... i.e. "loading the relevant variables" into your working memory
- Distracting yourself
This back-and-forth reliably leads to creative insight.
