Zach Bolan

Curriculum Vitae

Updated: August 2024

Hey, I'm Zach Bolan. My resume has the abbreviated version. This is the longer-form as I don't believe two pages of bullet points can properly sum up who I am or how I work. If you're looking for a little more narrative, then hopefully you find this to be helpful!

About Me

I'm a Tech-Lead experienced fullstack Web software engineer based out of Venice, California, just a few blocks from the Breakwater 🏄🏻‍♂️. My modus operandi is working at a higher level of abstraction; leading, mentoring, and challenging others, while jumping into the most difficult problems when needed. The problems that I'm enjoying solving revolve around Teams, Culture, and Scale. I empower my engineering team:

To continuously improve themselves, both personally and professionally
To design systems and drive innovation that directly bring value to our users
To have fun. Life is too short not to enjoy what we're doing

I am currently spending a significant amount of my energy and time launching HERDBUY ⇲ - an E-commerce website, with a twist, that gives power back to the buyer. This is as close to a startup from a garage as it gets, with a few college friends trying to build something cool (we're all remote, renting physical garages in California is expensive!). As the founding and lead engineer, I've bootstrapped the majority of the app and am responsible for every significant technical decision. While definitely a grind, it's honestly been refreshing to be laser focused on the product and trying to invent something that brings value to buyers and sellers. We had a soft launch in June where we learned a lot, and have now officially launched in late July 2024!

Other Interests 🌐

While I have nearly a decade of experience in Web development I have spent time working around computer graphics and video games. I've always been visually inclined (I was originally a Fine Arts major) and so tinkering in this area just feels natural. I also enjoy building things for builders, which is why I probably always end up building an engine rather than actually creating a game. And like any self-respecting engineer these, days I have done some work in Machine Learning. I'm passionate about seeing how ML can empower, not replace, creatives and builders.

I also care deeply about our environment and the future of our planet. I believe mitigating a climate crisis is one of the most pressing issues of our time. This is why I have moved my career into focusing on Climate, specifically into applying software and technology to meet the needs of our planet. I'm a Climatebase Fellow where I am currently deeply exploring the issues faced by the people and builders in the Climate space. There is tremendous opportunity to make an immense impact and I'm hopeful that I sit at the intersection of the Web, computer graphics, ML, and Climate.

Education

JAMES MADISON UNIVERSITY
May 2015

B.S. in Media Arts and Design
Minored in Computer Science

Work

Take a ride through my career and see not just what I've worked on and the tech, but the impact I made.

RESEARCH INNOVATIONS
July 2015 — Nov 2018

Learning the basics of not just software engineering, but learning how I work effectively.

I started my career off in Washington DC as a full-stack engineer at Research Innovations. I made a lot of mistakes, and then made some more. This is where I was first introduced to frontend frameworks and consequently built a lot in AngularJS and then React.

Being such a small company, I had the advantage of being involved in many decisions and really learned how software systems are built. Some key highlights:

Introduced modern tooling to the UI codebase, such as ES2015
Built the UIs and APIs for complex networked graph and time series visualizations
Helped migrate the legacy system to React by building the underlying component framework

By the time I moved on to my next role I was leading some small teams and projects, giving me a taste for what would come later.

LINKEDIN
Dec 2018 — Aug 2021

Learning software engineering at scale - how the big dogs work.

For my next play I was looking to really challenge myself and take things to the next level - and that's how I ended up at LinkedIn, largely as a frontend engineer. I was on a high-performing team building out Talent Insights, and then eventually moving over to work on various Recruiter features.

I onboarded my team onto LinkedIn's notification system, a multi-quarter effort of designing and implementation that had me working with multiple different teams across the entire tech stack from Ember, Java, HDFS, and Kafka. The infrastructure I built was in support of a machine learning anomoly detection engine that surfaces important events, such as when a company experiences layoffs. My work was the template for the team and allowed future notifications and alerts to be iterated on quickly. Additionally, I:

Built the APIs that consumed anomaly events and the UIs to display them in-app
Evangelized migrating to Octane and advocated for modern practices by putting them into practice. We were one of the first teams at LinkedIn to release customer facing products using the new framework
Designed a shareable read-only view of Talent Insights
Built some of the first underlying React components for Recruiter. These components represented the core building blocks, such as buttons, icons, lists, etc. that would be used by future React apps

Above all, my experience at LinkedIn taught me about scale. I'm not just talking about building systems for millions of users, but how to design systems and write code for an audience of hundreds of Engineers. And even more importantly, I learned how to effectively communicate, work with, and get buy in from these hundereds of Engineers, Designers, and Product Managers, all across the globe.

VIDEOAMP
Sep 2021 — Apr 2024

Taking control of the helm.

Most recently, I've sat as a Principal Software Engineer at VideoAmp. I was the Typescript Node subject-matter-expert, though I worked extensively across the tech stack with React, Go, Postgres, Snowflake, and Kafka.

As a Senior Software Engineer

I successfully evangelized and then led the effort to re-architect Node microservices to meet the increase in load and quality expectations on the systems.

Led and mentored a team that, in less than twelve months, grew from four engineers to over a dozen
Designed and built a new Node API that introduced stronger typings, a tighter architecture, and model validation
Gave frequent talks to promote best practices, Code Review standards, and advocated for Typescript APIs

The new system was delivered with zero downtime to users and we appraoched zero runtime alerts in the service when deployed. Shortly after, I was a Tech Lead on a separate project for measuring YouTube that was to be built on top of the new system. Again the team was able to move fast and deliver with no user-facing issues - proof that the new services were a success.

As a Principal Software Engineer

I took the learnings from those APIs and built new services which onboarded Typescript into the organization's new Bazel build system, where I focused on creating the best developer experience imaginable. Meanwhile, this effort was really ancillary - I was leading a team to design and launch a Report Templating Engine that would need to be built using these new tools. In three months I achieved both:

Typescript became a first-class supported programming language where I integrated GRPC, static database types, model validation, and integrated into the release pipelines
The engine was released on these new tools

The responsibilities only grew from there. Following that project I:

Helped build a team of six engineers with the Engineering Manager. As the Lead, I was responsible for all Scrum ceremonies, architecture, scoping, and project planning. My day was largely spent mentoring and unblocking the team through relentlessly improving processes, and I mostly got my hands dirty on the most difficult technical problems and designs
Architected the Platform 2.0 by integrating the acquired Elsy Platform into VideoAmp. I oversaw the higher-level architecture of combining the APIs, UIs, and data models, while delegating lower-level designs to the team.
Led the efforct for the company to adopt HTMX and OpenAPI tooling to power a Developer Portal for external API consumers. I pushed for the entire company to adopt RESTful API standards, defined our API lifecycle, and advocated for API Evolution

This had been the most rewarding period of my career thus far. It was addictive to witness the team learn and grow, and I was satisfied with how the decisions I made began to impact the engineering organization as a whole.

HERDBUY (Part Time)
Oct 2023 — Present

Let's get Started Up.

Bootstrapped(ing) an E-commerce startup HERDBUY.com ⇲ with three college friends. I've been focused on a few things:

Building. As the founding engineer, I am by definition extremely hands-on building out the infrastructure, backend Golang services, Postgres datastores, serverless Functions, and React user experiences
Balancing technical decisions that allow us to quickly deliver something that is valuable. I've cut multiple features, relied on manual processes until they don't scale, used off-the-shelf solutions where it made sense, and have built a LOT everywhere else (see above)
Shaping the company strategy. I helped us re-focus on attacking a single market that we could later grow from or dominate the niche

I've been extremely energized from building HerdBuy. Pouring my time and energy into something, and seeing others enjoy and get value out of what I created, is one of the main reasons why I fell into software. Building a company is likely something I will continue to do in the foreseeable future, in one form or another.

IVY ENERGY
July 2024 — Present

Climate and the Clean Energy Transition.

👀