Hi, I'm Zack.

I've spent more than a decade building software for the web, and these days I lead the teams that build it. I'm Director of Development at Max Connect Digital, where I design architectures, guide the team, and still write production code when it matters.

How I got here

I didn't start as an engineer. My first role at Allmoxy was client onboarding and training, and I kept wandering into the code until I'd moved into frontend engineering, rebuilding core UI components and making onboarding faster for the people I used to train.

From there I spent five years at Fluid Advertising, growing from senior web developer to Director of Development: leading Laravel and Vue rebuilds for more than 20 client projects and bringing version control, testing, and code review into a team that needed them. A stint at MRM // McCann had me shipping apps for Cisco, including an interactive Olympics map and a live video platform. Along the way I co-founded a small agency, Schematik, and I've kept an independent practice going since 2012.

At Max Connect I joined as a senior engineer and was leading development within a year. I architected Kudos, our marketing-attribution platform, which is now the system of record for more than $65M in annual media spend and was recently named a Digiday finalist for Best Attribution Tool, and MaxDB, our internal BI and revenue platform. More recently I've led the shift to AI-assisted engineering across the team, which is how I ended up deep in MCP. The whole story is on my resume.

How I work

I care about clean, boring, durable code, systems that scale without heroics, and shipping fast without breaking trust. The best engineering is the kind that turns into a real business advantage, quietly.

I'm equally happy setting architectural direction, hiring and growing engineers, or writing the first commit. With AI, I'm interested in what actually runs in production, not demo-ware: agents with real, well-guarded access to data, and tools that make a team measurably better. I also like giving things away; FortifyUI, Summit and a few others are open source.

Outside of work

I'm a husband and a dad first. These days that means a lot of baseball (my son is playing all of it), celebrating my wife finishing her bachelor's degree, and getting ready for a trip to Europe.

When I'm not at a keyboard for work, I'm usually at one for fun. I've been playing drums and guitar a lot more lately, and building my own VST plugins for Logic, with Claude, of course. I lift, I'm reading The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and there's almost always synthwave playing. What I'm up to right now.