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 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 Minneapolis, MN based professional web developer, computer scientist, and geek. I love designing user experiences for products and apps. I am committed to developing accessible web sites, especially in regards to site structure, content, and JavaScript functionality. I hand-code CSS and markup (HTML/XHTML) so it is valid, semantic, and optimized for search, speed, and bandwidth. I believe web software engineering requires professional level work and knowledge of best pratices. See my resume for details about my experience.
I find myself deeply interested in many topics, including:
- Product Design / Application Design
- LAMP stack (Linux / Apache / MySQL / PHP)
- Framework internals and creation
- Progressive Enhancement of User Interfaces (UI) using JavaScript
- Progressive Enrichment using CSS, exploiting bleeding edge browser capabilities
- Beer
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- mod_rewrite
- Software Design Patterns, e.g. Factory and Model-View-Controller (MVC)
- Application Security
- Video Games, especially 8-bit and 16-bit flavors
- Chiptunes
- Doing things for the lulz
- Pointers and manual memory management
- Algorithms and Data Structures
- Artificial Intelligences (AI) and Artificial Life (AL)
- Emergent Behavior
- Optimization
- Low-level network I/O with TCP and UDP sockets
- Daemons
- Command-Line Interfaces (CLI)
- The Mobile Web