Zach Archer
Work Experience
2020–
Apple
Senior Software Engineer
- All phases of full stack development, including project proposals, application deployment, and creating analytics dashboards to understand user behavior.
- Documented and advocated for best practices, including designing reusable components, and building wrapper classes and mixins to solve UI challenges site-wide.
- Mentored new developers, to share knowledge and promote best practices.
- Developed GUI applications for pre-silicon emulation and debugging, utilizing datasets larger than 1TB.
2007–
Control Z, Inc.
Senior Software Developer
- Developed embedded software in C and C++ to be intuitive, performant, reliable, and safe. Applications include large-scale LED installations, fitness devices, and controlling a high voltage heating element.
- Developed applications to accelerate workflows, including firmware simulation, and empowering designers to construct UI more efficiently.
- Used gdb and Ozone to debug code running on Nordic NRF, STM32, and FreeRTOS.
- Implemented text and graphics rendering layers on embedded systems, with compression to fit large character sets and UTF-8 strings.
- Designed and implemented realtime maps for an embedded fitness device, with GPS tracking, rotation, scaling, and custom bitmap compression for increased performance.
- Prototyping, UI design, and UX advocate for a popular fitness tracker.
- Component selection, PCB design, and engineering of hardware installations, including an all-weather 500-watt LED sign.
- Developed a live coding framework, virtual machine, and network architecture for an embedded platform, enabling rapid iteration and experimentation on-site.
- Developed configuration interfaces, enabling non-programmers to modify software behavior and appearance.
- Solved graphical and motion design challenges using OpenGL and WebGL, enabling visual experiences with millions of sprites, at 4K resolution.
- Developed algorithms for realtime analysis of motion, audio, and touch-based gesture recognition.
- iPhone and iPad development, including a best-selling multi-touch musical instrument on the App Store.
- Developed CMS applications, using various databases, front-end frameworks, and asset processing tools.
2006–
Second Story Interactive Studios
Interactive Developer
- Developed interactive media experiences to be responsive, engaging, and performant.
- Collaborated with designers to create fresh user interfaces and graphical effects.
- Built a configurable website framework, allowing designers to modify and perfect the visual design, without learning a programming language.
- Managed large data sets, and built custom APIs to search and retrieve assets.
2005–
Freelance
Web Developer
- Designed and built a website for a regional newspaper, including an events calendar, and maps to nearby distributors.
- Developed a CMS using Ruby on Rails and MySQL.
2002–
Mentor Graphics
Data Integrity Developer
- Developed an automated pipeline for collecting data and user requests, and updating staging and production databases.
- Curated a standardized dataset of major cities around the world.
1997–
Freelance
Audio Engineer
- Developed a web-based composition tool for extracting pleasant sounds from audio input, and synthesizing new beats and musical phrases.
- Developed lightweight applications for processing audio, and custom DSP effects.
- Music composition, sound design, and audio mastering for full-length and short films.
Education
1997
- University of California at Davis Bachelor of Arts: Music
Skills
- Code architecture
- Code review
- Compression
- Configuration driven development
- Debugging
- Graphics
- Hardware prototyping
- Human-centric interfaces
- Live-coding
- Mentoring
- Motion design
- PCB design
- Project planning
- Refactoring
- Simulators
- Software prototyping
- Soldering and assembly
- UI Development
- Unit testing
Technologies
- Arduino
- Autodesk EAGLE
- ARM
- Bootstrap
- C
- C++
- CSS
- Django
- Docker
- ESP32
- FreeRTOS
- Git
- GLSL
- HTML
- iOS
- JavaScript
- Jira
- KiCad
- Linux
- MySQL
- Node.js
- Objective-C
- OpenGL
- OpenSCAD
- PixiJS
- Python
- React
- Redux
- Sass
- Three.js
- TypeScript
- WebGL
- Webpack
- Xcode
Speaking Engagements
2019
- Teardown Conference “e-Paper Mega-Info-Dump”
2018
- Hackaday Superconference “Live Coding a 40-Foot LED Sign”
2018
- Teardown Conference “Programming For The Eye”
Interviews
2020
- Crosscut, KCTS 9 “Art Seen: The calculated creativity of coding”
2019
- The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast “Stories from Teardown 2019”