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
Taipei Home
Search Manadarin Real Estate Listings in English
Collaboration with Sara Sánchez
Finding good apartments in Taipei is tough! The best listings are all in Mandarin and, even if you can read it, the websites are difficult to use.
Google translate often fails and interfaces are hard-coded with text values that don't work in their translated form.
Recently designer Sara Sanchez and I were trapped inside by a typhoon, so we made a little tool that lets you search Mandarin real estate listings using English.
Fun stuff: 1. Search by proximity to any station in the Taipei MRT/Subway system 2. Search by proximity to universities and schools 3. Search the most common room configurations, including private suites or rooms subleased in people's houses
The interesting part was reverse engineering the APIs for the source data, to figure out how we could map English queries onto the various Mandarin categories.
Every search permutation was represented by a number and a cryptic category name, so there was a lot of trial and error with spreadsheet in hand.
Built with: React and a single 1000-line serverless function (AWS Lambda), Clay Base.
