About
zachstronaut is the web rocket-lab of Zachary Johnson (me), latest in a succession of web sites going back to 1996. I launched this site at the beginning of 2009 so I would have a place to show my love <3 for the internets and have a home for my experiments. Here you will find articles and projects for web professionals, software engineers, gamers, and geeks ranging in scope from the humorous to the very technical.
I am a freelance Creative Developer and geek living in Minneapolis, MN. What is a Creative Developer you ask? I am part computer scientist and part artist. I'm currently coding my way to the edges of the HTML5/CSS3/JS universe. I love to merge communication, creative problem solving, design, and technology. I wear many hats and get involved. I aspire to build human-focused products that aren't just useful, but also have entertaining user experiences. Please contact me if you'd like to work together on a project! I have over 10 years of experience and work quickly. I'm interested in small tasks, big projects, and everything inbetween. I've also got an extensive network we can leverage!
See my resume for details about my experience and education. Much of my career has been spent as a professional web developer and team leader. I've done a ton of custom LAMP and JavaScript work. I hand-code all of my CSS and markup (HTML/XHTML) so it is valid, semantic, and optimized for search, speed, and bandwidth. I've lectured on accessibility at the Big Ten. Iterative testing and development is my thing, and I've done international usability testing and user research.
I find myself deeply interested in many topics, including:
- The web stack (HTML / CSS / JavaScript)
- Cutting edge web tech like HTML5, CSS3, and WebGL
- Realtime web applications (Web Sockets and Node.js are interesting!)
- Using JavaScript in all sorts of weird places
- Product Design / Application Design
- Merging elements of gaming and behavior motivation into User Interfaces (UIs)
- The Mobile Web, iOS, Android
- LAMP stack (Linux / Apache / MySQL / PHP)
- Web best practices, e.g. Responsive Design, Progressive Enhancement, Progressive Enrichment
- Beer and malt and hops
- Video Games, especially 8-bit and 16-bit flavors
- Making video games at home
- Pixels
- Chiptunes
- Low-level network I/O with TCP and UDP sockets (and now Web Sockets are here!)
- Framework internals and creating new frameworks
- Apache's mod_rewrite
- Software Design Patterns, e.g. Factory and Model-View-Controller (MVC)
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Artificial Life (AL)
- Emergent Behavior
- Application Security
- Doing things for the lulz
- Pointers and manual memory management
- Algorithms and Data Structures
- Optimization
- Daemons
- Command-Line Interfaces (CLI)