zach.dev
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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
Vocabulary-First Software Design
AI changes how you analyze codebase quality.
A lot of nitpicky measures of "quality" (tabs vs spaces, "I don't like for...of loops!") barely mattered in the past. Now they matter not at all.
But quality factors like good domain objects, written in clear language, likely matter more than ever.
Since we program in natural language, the "vocabulary" of our codebase is the layer that integrates our intent with the latent space represented by the code.
Good language allows us to reliably steer these systems as we speak. Our words latch onto the language that exists.
I've built a variety of tools that take this Vocabulary-First approach to system design. I "lint" vocabulary during review. And when I write specs I focus on the name of data objects and function signatures.
It's easier to think about and the outputs seem better.
