I’m Zech. I build software.
For nine years, the days belonged to something else. I led a team at a grocery store in upstate New York: scheduling, logistics, keeping a floor running when three things break at the same time. It taught me more about systems than any classroom did, and I’ve got the CS degree to compare it against.
I made everything below in the margins of that job. Not anymore.
For six years I’ve built what a developer community runs on: the Discord bots, the infrastructure, the daily challenges I write for them. That’s Smarter Dev: more than 13,000 developers now, and growing. It isn’t loud. It’s people getting unstuck, which is the part I care about.
I build frameworks for the same reason other people do crosswords. I can write a dependency-injection library in a day; Bevy still took a dozen tries, because “it works” and “it’s right” are different problems and only one of them is interesting. Most of these are experiments more than products: they’re how I think a thing all the way through.
Lately I build the layer underneath AI tools: the orchestration that turns model calls into dependable work. The one I live in reads my email and runs my calendar so I don’t have to. I’m building it the way I run a floor: handle the mechanical, recursive, vigilant work, so the person is free to do the part only a person can.
That’s the thesis, honestly. Orchestration is a systems problem, and most teams treat it like a prompting problem. The interesting work in software right now isn’t typing faster: the machines do that now. It’s deciding what to build, specifying it precisely, and verifying it’s right. Judgment, not keystrokes. I write about that here.
I don’t have a viral post or a logo you’d recognize. What I have is six years of showing up, more than 800 challenges, written one weekday at a time, and a community that runs on what I built. Most of it before anyone was watching, in the hours when everyone else was asleep.
Those hours just became the whole day.
If you need agents doing dependable work in production, not demos, I take on scoped consulting engagements. Book a call →
Dreaming while others sleep.