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
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.
Oct 28, 2020
Scientific Freedom & Central Planning