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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
Escape Dead Earth Now on Steam!
I just published Escape Dead Earth, a strategy game, on Steam.
It will be available for purchase on the Steam marketplace in two weeks.
The last few months I've been paying off "creative debt". In practice that means going through my backlog and tying up the loose ends of creative projects.
Almost four years ago (!) my friend Cheng-Han (Naga) Chiang and I decided to build a radically simplified strategy game with the following constraint: the player can only use two mouse buttons for the entire experience.
This led to the design of Escape Dead Earth, which centers around a robot horde. The primary mouse button moves the horde in the direction of the cursor. The secondary mouse button absorbs any dead robots in the vicinity into your horde.
It's a simple, addictive, and fun loop.
An embarrassingly long time passed without publishing the final work. The game is a solid product. But it sat on my hard drive for almost 4 years.
So much time has passed that both Naga and I look back with the benefit of 4 years of growth as developers and smile at our various mistakes and shortcomings from an earlier time. Such is creative debt.
The Steam publication process was a drag. It took many hours just to fill out all the forms they need to list the product. Each step felt bureaucratic and I was often confused. It was more like doing taxes than launching a new product.
Escape Dead Earth be available in February 2020 in English, Spanish, Traditional Chinese (Mandarin), and Simplified Chinese.
Hope you enjoy it!
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