zach.dev
StartupCities
StoresData
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LearnClaude.ai
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!
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Contact:hello @ zach.dev
I'm so confused by the conversation around data centers. It's like mass hysteria.
I keep reading articles that call data centers "atomic bombs" and make terrifying claims about heat islands, water use, electromagnetic waves, and more.
It's valid to worry about problems, of course. Data center noise, for one, seems like a real nuisance. But every time I do even the tiniest bit of research on the scariest claims, they look made up.
Some media is clearly lying. But mostly, people build big lies from small truths like using big, scary numbers without context.
The fear is especially odd because data centers are boring suburban warehouses with boring rows of boring computers. They are also... not new. Yet they've become a symbol of fear and uncertainty about technology, especially AI.
I hope rationality prevails (a boy can dream, right?). Where real problems exist, they can be understood and fixed. But the carousel of fake fear does no one any good.
