zach.dev
StartupCities
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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
Everything Old Is New Again
With AI coding agents like Claude Code, everything old is new again:
1. Waterfall Design
Since code gets generated, I find myself spending a lot of time writing things out, diagramming, and understanding how to verify a system's behavior before writing any code. All the docs and diagrams can feel a bit old-fashioned given that modern startups shied away from frontloaded architecture and design.
2. Test-Driven Development (TDD)
Code agents seem to do better if you write the tests first than if you write the code first. This was the theory of test-driven development. In practice, TDD is brutal on an all-human engineering team. But now tests feel cheap to write.
3. Command Line Interfaces (CLIs)
Command line interfaces were the OG tools of software development, all the way back to UNIX days. Engineers in 2026 are now swimming in CLIs since they're so useful to AI agents.
Everything old is new again!
