Who is this Rob Z. Guy Anyway?
Nothing about me is linear or well compartmentalized, so I find it difficult to really explain myself in a quick, biographical manner like this.
Not that I won't try!
So, let's break me down into the component parts you're most likely to care about.
Professionally
I started programming for fun when I was around 10 years old. I built one of the first student-run personal web pages on the UC Berkeley campus in 1994. I went to college to be a mechanical engineer, but was washed out of the program by advanced math. I then pursued a career in newspaper journalism, just in time for the internet to kill it. Despite the fact that I knew it would kill my love for it, I listened to the people telling me to pursue a career as a developer.
I started as a front end producer - taking product ideas and graphical designs and turning them into interactive, browser-based experiences. I expanded my knowledge to understand the full web stack - frontend (HTML, JavaScript, CSS), backend (application servers: Perl, Java, PHP, C#, etc.), data management (DB Administration: SQL Server, MySQL, Postgres, etc.), and infrastructure (Operations: Linux, Apache, Nginx, TCP/IP, network administration).
As a developer, I've worked for several now-defunct startups as well as big companies like Intuit.
I grew tired of not having much control over what I built - professional developers tend to build only what they're told to build - so I switched to the "business" side of the house, with a focus on marketing and online community as I believe that's where the most value can be derived from networked services.
This eventually morphed into a role as an "Evangelist" and "Thought Leader". I traveled the world and spoke on a variety of stages and in front of dozens of executive teams to share my thoughts on online strategy, especially as it pertained to deploying an API program to encourage developers - both in their orgs and in their customer ecosystems - to collaborate using their data and functionality.
My API expertise covers both the technical side - API design, microservices implementations, API management, etc. - and the strategic side - go to market program development, strategic planning, executive coaching and consultation.
For more information, you can check out my LinkedIn Profile.
Technically
I am an unabashed, unashamed, inveterate geek. My interest in computers started very young. I learned BASIC on a hand-me-down, obsolete TRS-80 clone produced by Lobo Systems. This convinced the adults in my life to start investing what little money they had in trying to encourage my future.
They eventually upgraded me to the x86 platform. I also wound up with an old 300 baud Hayes modem that introduced me to the power of digitally networking with other human beings. I spent hours on the Compuserve, GEnie and Prodigy dial-up services until I finally got the equipment to gather to host my own BBS using Gap software, joining the burgeoning Orange County, CA, BBS community.
I first got access to the internet when I started college at Berkeley in 1993. As part of orientation, my residence hall took a field trip to the Exploratorium at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. That's where I first experienced the "world wide web" and the Mosaic browser. When I got back to campus, I immediately sought out the Open Computing Facility (OCF), which handed out a series of 3.5" floppies containing Mosaic, WinSock, and other software so I could connect to their servers from my dorm room.
In 1994 I launched "Sneh" - my personal website built entirely in HTML, since that's literally all there was to the web back then - on the OCF system. We call these things "weblogs" or just "blogs" now, but things were so new then, we didn't have any good terminology for it yet.
I pursued this as a career because I genuinely enjoyed it and kind of bought into the whole, "do something you love, and you'll never work a day in your life" bullshit. I enjoyed the people I worked with and I was able to accelerate my technical learning by focusing on building stuff with it every day. But the things the people I worked for wanted me to build never made much sense to me and were never truly satisfying.
Over the years, I made many attempts to build cool web experiences to share with others. In 2003, I was inspired by the "smart mob" movement partially documented by Howard Rheingold and started organizing such events in San Francisco. At the time, it was me and a guy known only as "Bill" operating out of New York. I built a site called "Flock Smart" to help others organize their own smart mobs (also known as "Flash Mobs"), but had to let it go as demands from both my full time job and my personal life took priority.
To learn Ruby on Rails, I developed a site call "Goaltastic" to help people track their personal goals, find others with similar goals, and get the support and accountability we all need to achieve such ambitions. But building and deploying a thing and actually going to market with a thing are two different skill sets, and I had only developed the first one at that point, so I never gained any traction.
This led to me pursuing a position as a strategic consultant helping large organizations build and deploy fully fledged API programs, where I quickly learned how to develop go to market plans alongside providing API design and strategic technical guidance for our customers.
My geekiness is expressed in everything I do - I'm not much of an EECS geek, but I enjoy messing with sensors, microcontrollers, and other hardware and IoT projects; I have discovered the joy of gardening, but love even more understanding and witnessing the soil and nutritional science underpinning it all; I love to brew wine and beer - and, yes, drink it - but love it more for the process and scientific creativity than the actual product.
Personally
Some of this may seem a bit... TMI... but I intend on spending a fair amount of time writing about my personal philosophy and mental model of the world here, so it's important to have some context for where these ideas are coming from.
I grew up in Orange County. My parents divorced when I was seven and, though I stayed with my father every other weekend, it was pretty much just me and Mom until I left for college. Because of the financial burden of being a single woman raising a son in the 80s, we moved seven times over the course of about nine years. That lack of a sense of stability motivates a lot of my personal philosophy today.
My mother was the absolute best mother I could have possibly asked for. When I lost her in 2005 when I was 30, it devastated me in a way I still struggle to explain. That's also when I learned that my father was not actually my biological father. Mom had told me they struggled to conceive and had gone through fertility treatments at UC Irvine to have me. She intentionally left out the part where those treatments resulted in the discovery that my father was sterile due to a childhood bout with scarlet fever. My relationship with my father has always been iffy at best - perhaps I'll go into it deeper at some point as that context is also vital to my views on things - and she never wanted to be the reason I finally decided to cut him off.
He's still my father, mind you. But the lack of a genetic connection explains SOOOOOOOO much about his relationship and attitudes toward me.
I met the woman who would become my wife on Match.com in 1999 - before it was cool. We married in 2003, eventually bought a house in Concord, CA, had a son in 2008, and remain happily married, even when our personal anxieties about the state of things make it hard.
As I write this, I am 50 years old. I have spent almost 2/3 of my life living in the Bay Area and a little more than half my life committed to the same wonderful woman. This half has been - without question - far, far better than the first because she is in it.
My son kicks ass. He reminds me so much of myself that I sometimes mistake him for me - weird as that seems - but quickly snap out of it because he is absolutely his own man with his own interests and his own direction, all of which fills me with an overwhelming sense of pride.
At the end of the day, they are all that really matter to me. Everything I do is in service of trying to create a better world for them and for me to enjoy being with them.
Which is why I am so filled with anger and anxiety whenever anything threatens that - economic instability, political instability, dumb obligations placed on us by people who feel no obligation to us.
Why Are We Here?
I have started so many sites and blogs and other online experiences in the past that I have let die on the vine. So why should this be any different?
For one thing: I have recently shifted my priorities from pursuing a career in the tech industry to building cooperative, mutually supportive communities. Between the risk of trying to run my own business and just doing whatever some rich asshole asks me to do in exchange for a salary and the occasional bonus, I always chose the latter because I was conditioned to believe it was the more stable, safest route.
But I have watched my hard work be destroyed and devalued time and again by executive leaders who confidently claimed their strategies were the right path for the company, only to see everything fall flat on its face because of short-sighted, short term thinking.
Most appalling is how my peers and I - the people who actually delivered the value these fools claimed ownership and control over - predicted these failures long before they happened, tried to warn them of the consequences of their dumb decisions to only be met - at best - with platitudes that they know what they;re doing or - at worst, and most common - outright hostility that we weren't "team players".
I found myself unemployed during the pandemic, when the big tech companies started circling the wagons because of the uncertainty. I had been at WeWork for six months until it collapsed in spectacular fashion in 2019. I was let go in late January of 2020 and decided to take February off to recover and try and cure the deep, deep burnout that had overtaken me. I was pretty deep down the interview path of a few well known companies - at least two of them were in the, "We're putting together an offer" stage - when, one by one, they informed me they were freezing hiring until the economic uncertainty of the lockdowns subsided.
I eventually scored a couple of full time gigs during that time, but one of the companies rapidly went under and the other was so beyond the pale abusive and exploitative that I walked out after three months.
It was at this point that I realized the risk was pretty much the same whether I worked for them or myself. So I threw myself into full time consulting, which has left me more financially unstable than ever, but has provided a level of control over my life I refuse to give up.
I still have a toe dipped in the tech industry, but I'm watching it fall apart for at least the third time in my career, and this time I'm hoping it stays down.
I still believe the internet is a net good for humanity and our communities. I believe we have allowed selfish, visionless idiots who see the world exclusively through a lens of money direct the efforts of people who actually know how to leverage this technology for good. My peers tend to be people who came to tech not to get rich, but because they genuinely wanted to create a better world, augmenting human ability and intelligence with appropriate technology that builds and frees instead of destroys and indentures into servitude.
This blog is hosted on a platform I built myself called "SociallyOnward". I intend for this to be my career focus for the remainder of my life - building and fostering communities online that can have positive impact offline, bringing people together to share the work, share the proceeds, build trust, and ensure everyone within their reach is well fed, well loved, and well rested. For someone who is naturally suspicious of ambition, this is my most ambitious project yet.
We're here because I hope you will join me. I hope that, together, we can find a way to stop fighting and start building community, trust, camaraderie, and a genuine lasting peace for ourselves and the communities that matter most to us without causing negative downstream consequences for others to deal with.
This is but my first step in a much, much larger journey.
If nothing else - it'll be entertaining to watch.
How Can You Watch?
As I write this, I am still implementing the social networking capabilities of my platform in preparation for public release. I am using the ActivityPub protocol for this. When this is live, you will need an ActivityPub-enabled account on a service like Mastodon, PixelFed, PeerTube, etc. to comment and engage with my writing here. I'm also working on getting an RSS feed for this live.
I'm a solo dev who refuses to "vibe code" - these things take time.
Until then, you can find me on my self-hosted Mastodon instance by following the address: @robz@toot.robzazueta.com. You'll still need an ActivityPub account for this, though, so... now's a good time to get one!
Eventually, you'll even have an opportunity to get an AP-enabled account directly on my platform, which is really my ultimate goal with it. SociallyOnward is intended to be a replacement for Facebook Groups, NextDoor, and - eventually - the Google Office suite that can be hosted by members of the community they serve.
I'll write more on SociallyOnward when it's more ready for prime time - which should be before the end of 2025.