About Zack

TL;DR:

Software Engineer who loves working in iOS, backend systems, and front-end frameworks. Passionate about projects that help people live better lives. In addition to writing software, I’m a cheerleading coach, an acroyoga teacher, and sometimes photographer. I live in Newport, RI but will travel from time to time.

Longer Story : Tech & Photo

I grew up on the east coast. Spending years in Westport, CT, Haverford, PA and Lexington, KY, with side trips to Newport, RI and Killington, VT. I consider all of these locations formative to who I am today. My father was in retail and you can read about it in The Kingdom of Prep among other places. I have two younger brothers who both live in CT with wonderful neices and a nephew. My parents still live in CT.

When I was in 7th grade, my family had just moved to Lower Merion, PA and my father was buying a new computer. In his search he brought me to a place called The Computer Store, which funnily enough sold computers. There I met a host of people: Pat, Manny, and Chris who worked there. During my 7th and 8th grade years, these people would foundational in my long term interest, maybe even obsession with Technology. They taught me about the internet and how to use my computer. They helped with my education in the subject and eventually helped land me a job at an ISP. This was back in the day when an ISP was basically just an office, no crazy security or server rooms. The people at the ISP taught me more about computers and even gave me my first tech job.

When I was going into 10th grade, my family moved to Lexington, KY. I went a small school and the computer teacher was also the editor of the newspaper. He also taught a class on photography and photo journalism. That is when I got my first camera and started to learn about photography.

When my family returned to CT in my Junior year of high school, I started working at a friends camera store and learned even more about photography. I took a bunch of computer classes and joined the computer club.

When I went off to college, I picked my school based on a number of factors, but my major wasn’t one of them. I didn’t know if I would be doing computer science or psychology. Because of this I started off Liberal Arts Undecided as both the computer science and the psychology department where in that field. After a semester of classes all over the place from history and many other liberal arts requirements, I decided to switch to computer engineering. The college of Engineering had a pretty tough reputation, but even though the classes were supposedly harder, my GPA went up when I switched to Engineering.

I graduated with a degree in computer engineering with a minor in computer science and went to work for a nifty company doing some work with Ruby On Rails in Greenwich CT. I had a bunch of fun learning my craft, but after a year of working for a smaller company I got poached by Bloomberg in Manhattan. I spent the next twenty months working for a solid company that was secretly a tech company, but was run like a financial company. I even moved to NYC for a year of it, but it wasn’t for me.

I left for California because I believed that if I wanted to learn more about technology and how do things right, that was the best place to be. I was right. I spent twelve years in California working for a number of companies, both small and big. I learned about programming and created a much more solid technical network. I went to big events in San Fran, and smaller meetups. I met some tech people that I was in awe of and most of them were really just down to earth people like me.

I moved back to the east coast during the pandemic, living in beautiful Newport, RI. I’m taking some time to figure out exactly where I belong next.