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
Subtractive Computing
Towards a Toolchain for Deep Work
I have the greatest laptop ever made: a 2015 Macbook Pro. The top model of its era, this powerhouse is legendary among developers and prized on the secondary market. It will eventually be dethroned but, to me, this laptop remains the undisputed king. I can do anything I want on it. And that's the problem.
I also own a $90 Raspberry Pi 400. My little Pi is inferior in every way to my laptop. It has a brutally slow processor, flaky WiFi, and only 4 gigs of RAM. The Bluetooth never seems to work. If I accidentally remove the SD card the operating system self-destructs and I have to re-install everything from scratch.
Yet I find myself using this bargain-bin computer often, in particular when I need to write prose or code outside my day job. I'm using it now. The Pi is painful at times. If I open more than 5 or 6 tabs, it grinds to a halt. Watching YouTube videos is so slow and clunky that I always give up. I could probably use social media, but since I've never used it on the Pi, it feels weird to start. Plus the accounts aren't logged in and the URLs aren't in autocomplete.
In short, the Pi adds all sorts of friction into my workflow. And I can't do anything about it. It's in the hardware. Most would see this as a bad thing. But I've come to like it, even to imagine it as a sort of distinct experience for the modern knowledge worker.
No doubt some of this is foolish nostalgia. The Pi takes me back to the computing of my childhood — full of delays, random errors, and a fragility that Apple's engineering army has long overcome. But the Pi offers more than nostalgia.
It offers: Subtractive Computing.
By being so underpowered, the Pi subtracts capabilities. It forces my hand. I can't open a thousand tabs. I can't browse the news while my code compiles. I can't play music. In short, I can't multitask — at least not easily. Sometimes this is annoying. But, often, it's a liberation.
The Pi's sluggish hardware gives me time to sit and stare and think as the little light on the keyboard flashes its way through some task. It's single-tasking, enforced by hardware. This is a welcome respite from the usual 1000-tab-and-windows-Slack-message-chiming-Zoom-call-having-eternal-multi-tasking mode that defines much of remote work.
The Deep Work crowd has done much to promote excellent software solutions to remove distraction and promote focus (such as Freedom and RescueTime). I love these solutions. But I think hardware has an interesting role to play.
In a future post, I'll share my designs for a Deep Work computer that fully embodies my personal vision of Subtractive Computing.
