Hello! I’m Zack 👋

What is a Mental Stack? I enjoy playing fighting games like Street Fighter. There’s a concept prevalent in Street Fighter (and fighting games generally) called the “Mental Stack”. The “Mental Stack”, as defined by Yassin Hussein at Redbull ESports is “how much a player needs to keep track of during the match”. The current release Street Fighter 6 has a noticeably taller mental stack than previous iterations of the series, with a significantly higher amount of mechanics, special moves, offensive and defensive strategies than the “Super Turbo” arcade cabinets of yore....

@types/react in a Mono Repo The past few weeks my team and I have been dealing with the absolute nightmare that is developing a React 18 application in a React 17 mono repo. We’ve dealt with issues with the @types/react package in the past. These issues were easily solved when our whole mono repo is on the same version of React (17). Now that we are moving forward to React 18 things are starting to get hairy....

Preface I use vim (NeoVim) for my day to day TypeScript development. For my day job, I was tasked with doing some work in Scala. The README for this application recommended installing IntelliJ IDEA and getting everything set up. While I have used IntelliJ for JVM development in the past, I would prefer to stick to the terminal with my familiar workflows. So it was time to dig into setting up my development environment for Scala....

Preface For the maiden voyage of https://zackery.dev I decided to write about the tools I use for everyday development. I’ve been developing now for four years and in that time I’ve had quite the journey to where I am now. Over the years I’ve got quite a few questions about what I use for productivity. I thought I would highlight some of those tools here. As a prelude, I develop primarily on macOS and Linux (via ChromeOS)....