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?"
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Contact:hello @ zach.dev
The Joys of Retro Computing
Last week I visited the beautiful Media Archaeology Lab at UC Boulder. It's located in the basement of an unassuming single-family home near the campus. Once you descend the staircase, you're in a veritable mecca of retro-computing.
Let's look at some of these gorgeous machines:
This Zenith had a quasi Apple touchbar at the top. Actuated like those old, squishy ATM button interfaces. Also a phone/modem built in.
This one triggered some hardcore nostalgia for elementary school computer lab in the mid-90's.
Possibly the best keyboard in the place was on this Commodore 64. It was running a Super Mario Brothers port.
This old Canon had a fascinating VIM-like interaction built into the keyboard. No arrow keys. Only keyboard combinations used in conjunction with the two buttons at the bottom to move the cursor forward and back. Supposedly Canon believed this would revolutionize keyboards.
Huge collection of Byte Magazine and every old game console you might imagine. Weirdly the Playstation made me more nostalgic than the Nintendo.
One take away is how tactile this older generation of devices are (fans, whirring, clicking, beeping). Amazing keyboards.
Also, that today's generalized computers come at a high cost: distraction. These old style single-purpose devices for writing are really compelling.
