nerdy bio

Who are you, and what do you do?

Hello, world! My name is Devon. I'm a writer, of code and words. The thing that matters most to me is unlocking human potential, so I think a lot about incentive design, tools for thought, and cities.

What keeps me busy these days:

• I'm working with Pronomos, a seed stage fund that invests in startup cities.
• I interview computing pioneers for a video series called Tools & Craft.
• I write about incentive design, land use policy, tools for thought, placemaking, and more on this blog.

Previously, in reverse chronological order:

• I founded [GitHub Sponsors][github-sponsors], a tool for funding open source software. This stemmed from research I did about coordination problems, market design, and anthropology in open source.
• I hosted a show for a16z about crypto, and I built identity attestation protocols on the blockchain at [Bloom][].
• I was a software engineer on the Identity team at [Affirm][].
• In college, I was Editor in Chief at The Stanford Review.

In my free time I read weird blogs, build side projects, take public transit, and ride my bike. I love reasoning about, improving, and designing systems and infrastructure.

What hardware(tools) and software do you use?

• [MacBook Pro][macbook-pro] (16")
• Second monitor
• [HP OfficeJet Pro 8030][officejet-pro-8030] series - It's important to put things you're thinking about on your walls! I can't say I recommend this particular printer though
• [Blue Yeti microphone][yeti] for podcasts
• A globe that sits on my desk, which I refer to more often than you might expect
• [Treadmill for under-desk][sf-t7945] gives me a few thousand extra steps per day

Oh dear, so much. I'm probably going to miss a few, but here goes:

• [Logseq][] for thinking
• [Evernote][] for quick-access + archiving articles I've read
• [Notion][] for a shared workspace with other people
• [Planta][] for caring for my plants
• iCalendar, but not quite how you'd expect
• [Postach.io][] for publishing my blog from Evernote
• [VSCode][visual-studio-code] as my primary text editor
• [Anki][] for memorizing things I want at my mental fingertips
• [SelfControl][] for blocking websites I want to avoid for a period of time
• [Gather.town][gather] for hosting online events in a way that's more fun than [Zoom][zoom.2]
• [Zencastr][] for recording podcasts
• [Google Sheets][google-sheets] for quickly analyzing data + creating graphs
• [Figma][] for all sorts of things
• [Mailspring][] for email
• [Pocket Casts][pocket-casts] for podcasts
• [Lupa][] for practicing Spanish
• [Intelligent Translator][intelligent-translator] as a menu bar app for translation
• [iStat Menus][istat-menus] for menu bar widgets like weather, laptop temperature, CPU usage, etc
• [Alfred][] as an application launcher and general productivity tool
• Text expansions to make my typing faster (e.g. "d@" expands to "devonzuegel@gmail.com")
• [Blender][] for 3D modeling (though I'm not very good at it yet)
• [Otter.ai][otter] so I can record voice notes which I transcribe into essays later
• [Screenotate][] for making screenshots more useful
• [Typescript][] and [Clojure][] as my primary programming languages, though I used to do a code lots [Ruby][] and [Python][] in the past too

What would be your dream/dream setup?

I wish I could have everything laid out on surfaces all around my space, like you can with physical objects. It bums me out that everything is constrained to my computer screen. I want to think more spatially, but computers don't lend themselves to that very well.

One step towards that would be for my entire wall to be a high-resolution screen that is on all of the time, and then I can just throw stuff on there for later and come back to it when I walk up to it. Even that is more limiting than I'd like, but it'd be a step forward.

I also wish that all the different places I take notes and clip articles were more connected. I use different tools for different types of tasks, but it's too bad that comes with the tradeoff that those things are then siloed from each other.