I'm a software engineer and
entrepreneur focused on modern web technologies and AI.
Here's an ongoing autobiography, which also shares the story of my by-the-bootstraps "unschooling" education: now the subject of a chapter on grit and resilience in the bestselling book
by Barbara Oakley.
An angel investor once described my core soft skill
in the role of founder or early team member
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.
In the past, I coined the term "Startup Cities" as co-founder of StartupCities.org and a startup spinoff, both of which focused on why startups should build cities. I now write about Startup Cities at
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.
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?"
Have fun exploring!
Click the Start Menu to learn more.
Contact:hello @ zach.dev
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!
Other links:
Jan 23, 2020
VICE.com Reviews Escape Dead Earth