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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
Twitterized Intelligence
In the 2010s I'd often hear people say, "I didn't read the book, I just read the blog post."
Now it's more like: "I read an AI summary of the tweet thread of the blog post of the book."
Where do the benefits of compressing information end? Saving time is good!
But I feel I can often sense when a person mostly consumes highly compressed information. These people are often very smart, but their intelligence is "Twitterized" ("X-ified"?) In conversation they resist depth and their reasoning is bite-sized.
But how much does going deep actually matter? Maybe "knowing the gist" of most things is fine in a world where so much is delegated to external intelligence.
Yet I have to believe there's a limit. Most value accrues from depth. The overlooked pattern appears to those who know the existing patterns. The wisdom to know how and how not to delegate comes from time.
Going deep feels both easier and harder than ever. AI is a magical universal tutor. Yet the temptation to compress everything always lurks nearby.
