zach.dev
StartupCities
StoresData
Hire Me
LearnClaude
Spotify CLI
BuiltWith MCP
Claudem Ipsum
Who?I'm a software engineer and product leader focused on modern web technologies and AI.
An angel investor once described my core soft skill 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.
This website was built by hand, before AI.
Here's an ongoing autobiography, which shares my story of leaving school in 9th grade to join the workforce: now the subject of a chapter on grit and resilience in the bestselling book Mindshift by Barbara Oakley.
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.
In a past life, I coined the term "Startup Cities" as co-founder of StartupCities.org in Guatemala City and a startup spinoff, both of which focused on why startups should build cities. This was originally a fringe idea, but has now attracted significant capital and founder interest in the 2020s. I sometimes write about Startup Cities at StartupCities.com
I read and collect obscure memoirs from the history of business and technology. You can find some of them in my public library. Send me your recommendations!
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?"
Click the Start Menu to learn more. Have fun!
Contact:hello @ zach.dev
The Golden Age of Domain Driven Design
It's the golden age of Domain Driven Design in software.
I've always liked DDD, where you model software in real-world nouns and verbs, often with the help of domain experts.
In the old world, you'd spend hours arguing about names and little details of relationships. I've never seen a team able to stick to DDD over the long run.
But now you can rip an LLM across your domain language and shape a system like clay.
Once you have this clear language, it's trivial to convert it to strict code, or system diagrams that give you a visual on the design.
The best part of LLM-assisted DDD is that the code (data model 'nouns' and function 'verbs') becomes a human-readable set of docs and constraints. The natural language helps fight "Claudevoice" and other problems of AI slop.
After years of wading through mud to make changes to systems, it's a thrill to learn something about your domain and watch your LLM thread your learning through the system.
