Hi, I'm Zach, a product designer and builder.

I had just led the design of the Walmart Seller App to a 4.8★ iOS launch when Walmart's forced RTO ended my tenure. My family and I weren't moving to Arkansas. So I was out.

After four years of grinding the hectic corporate lifestyle, I needed a break. For four months I couldn't even think about design or Figma or whatever it meant to jump into another pit of fire. I spent time away from it all and it was restful... until it wasn't.

I finally jumped back in. I was completely overwhelmed. The abrupt shift to AI-everything was staring me straight in the eye and I felt like I was already behind. Mass hysteria was (and still is) plaguing LinkedIn and YouTube. Some people were getting decent results, but most were churning out slop. Every tutorial and cheat sheet I consumed was outdated within days.

I attempted to ease into it with Figma Make only to find its output limiting and with a total lack of control. I've always been heavily system-oriented; there was no way I could do this long term. But I had to update my portfolio site and I figured this would be the quickest way. I ended up spending so much time stuck in old ways of working. Designing screens in Figma, passing them over, filling gaps. Regardless, I made it work because I needed to get something live.

As I hit the market, I felt like a drop in the ocean. Mass layoffs everywhere. The market was flooded. I sent out flurries of applications and the response was mostly nothing at all. When I did hear back, it was that they wanted someone with specific domain knowledge. But I didn't have ecom experience when I joined Walmart. Good design is about understanding, clarifying, concepting, and validating. You don't need prior experience raising kids to have kids. You jump in and optimize as you go. It's not life-saving surgery. You become proficient by ruthlessly digging into every crevice, making mistakes, and fixing them.

But the hunt was real. The stress. The burnout. Then it hit me.

I'm fighting so hard for a job I don't even want anymore.

I was applying for roles similar to where I just was. Large corporate companies. A calendar jam-packed with meetings. Hustle culture. Out-of-touch job descriptions expecting the moon on a stick. So much of it was about the theatre of design, not the true messy in-betweens that are the real fun. I've been a creator since I was a young kid. That's what I want to do. Whatever is in these job descriptions is not it.

I took another step back and decided I was going to dive deep into the new workflow with AI. It didn't take long to realize Figma was never going to be my source of truth again. I invested my energy in GitHub as the centerpiece. Not a design tool or IDE, just a pure source. I moved through Cursor, landed on Claude Code, and I feel comfortable saying I have a stack I trust.

I’ve been designing in this industry for 15+ years. From Illustrator and Photoshop to deploying a fully architectured monorepo with an artificial intelligence agent (wtf!). What matters most to me now is finding a smart, creative, and relaxed team of humans who want to invent, build, and do work that matters. If we’re aligned, reach out! I’d love to solve hard problems with you and have fun while we do it.