Headshot of Zak Reynolds

hey, i'm zak.

I'm a software engineer who architects, designs, and builds great web and cloud solutions, and I do game jams on the side. Currently scaling a large, multi-tenanted website platform!

a few socials

some say i'm

  • aligned chaotic good
  • proficient in perception
  • rockstar-ish
  • super empathetic

daytime projects

  • Website migration tool
  • Cloud-based sass compiling service
  • Enterprise repository analytics app
  • Development process automation
  • IaC development and migration
  • React modules for CMS app

weekend projects

things that make me happy

  • Sustainability
  • User consent and awareness
  • Privacy and tracking controls
  • Inclusiveness
  • Health
  • Quality design and engineering
  • Root cause analysis
  • Great food
  • Meaningful work
  • Tabletop gaming
  • Coding for humans
  • Solving challenging problems
  • Bottom-up design
  • Understanding industry best practices
  • Accounting for extra-functional concerns
  • Domain-first design and problem solving
  • Good vibes
  • Minimalism
  • Event-driven architecture
  • Learning
  • Martin Fowler's blog
  • Creating joy
  • Deleting accidental complexity
  • Brutalism
  • Chorizo breakfast burritos

things i do at work

  • Architecture and system design for a multitenanted web platform that serves 14,000 websites and an average of 10.6 million requests per day.
  • Mentoring other developers, resolving conflicts within teams and between departments, and providing guidance at critical moments in projects.
  • Designed and implemented architecture for a set of modules that automate website migrations.
  • Managed and implemented a project to migrate files from a complex legacy system to AWS S3.
  • Identifying and extracting legacy functionality into microservices. Separating domain code from technical code. Refactoring existing codebase to remove accidental complexity.
  • Designed and developed automation for managing a git methodology that supports multiple deployment environments and over 40 project repositories, enhancing CI/CD practices.
  • Monitoring, diagnosing, and solving system performance issues. Resolved a longstanding issue that was causing a 10-second spike in average response times every few weeks.
  • Creating infrastructure in AWS with Terraform and paving the way for new feature development to be possible for other teams.
  • Designed, architected, and functioned as lead of a geodistributed team implementing a form builder for power users. Developed a set of client modules using React, Typescript, and Redux, and a dotnet core service with an HTTP interface and database tables for a backend service.
  • Architected and functioned as team lead implementing a drag-and-drop web layout editor. Primarily used React, Redux, and material-ui for a client module, and a dotnet core service with an event-oriented interface integrated with RabbitMQ.

more about me

I started my coding journey early, using Allegro and Microsoft XNA in the 00s to remake my favorite Nintendo games — or at least I tried to! I later pursued a business administration degree with a marketing concentration, and while I found the experience valuable, I realized it wasn't the career path for me.

I returned to hobby game development with Unity, and I started entering game jams, reading, and building hobby projects while searching for a way to kick off a career in software. I was fortunate to find an excellent software development program at Western Governors University, and I started an internship at ARI Network Services (now LeadVenture), which gave me experience building websites and enterprise .NET applications.

The combination of business, design, and engineering experience with my human-first approach to work has enabled me to help projects succeed, invent products and featuresets, and take on more responsibility.