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
Shopify Analytics
A Data Pipeline of Shopify Stores
Converted a web scraper and CRM into a data pipeline for marketing to the owners of Shopify sites.
This project was an interesting challenge because some steps in the data processing were fully automated, while others had a Human-API-like layer where data was managed and changed by humans before being passed on to the next step in the pipeline.
This project included:
- Internet sleuthing how to find good data about Shopify sites
- Scraping at large scale, parsing, gathering, and integrating that data with multiple 3rd party services for lead prospecting and website analysis
- Rebuilding a UI that brings data on demand to contractors so they can quickly edit and create custom content for leads
- Integrating multiple services across AWS to manage a workload with CSVs with hundreds of thousands of rows
Built with: NodeJS, ReactJS, MongoDB (Atlas), AWS
Dec 23 2018
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