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
Programming and Stone Carving
Imagining virtual spaces for focused work
A Continuous Shape from Eyes & Ears on Vimeo.
How might we make the process of digital craft (e.g. programming/design) more closely resemble a traditional craft like stone carving?
The experience of knowledge work is a mess. The posture, the habits, the tools that people use for knowledge work are barely distinguishable from "I'm hanging out watching YouTube" or "I'm playing video games".
I pay for a toolchain to block websites and monitor my time panopticon-style — just to make sure I maintain high programming productivity!
This is absurd.
Would people even need this stuff if the craft of programming resembled stone carving?
There's just less room for nonsense in a more physical workflow. A stone carver can't pretend to multitask when chiseling granite. She has this amazing workshop dedicated to her work full of dust and heavy tools.
No one would enter that workshop and decide to slouch in a chair and burn two hours on Twitter.
How can I put on a VR headset and be transported to a deep-focus hacker lair? I want to feel physically tired at the end of a day coding.
Why can't I reach out and pull documentation pages from an infinite bookshelf? Make architecture diagrams in 3-dimensions? Write code on a screen the size of a bedroom wall? Tell Google Assistant to project a Stack Overflow answer on a floating panel to my right?
There is something categorically different about a workflow like this. It's more animal. It invites full engagement. And no one feels desperate for distraction when fully engaged.
