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, 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 do you use?
- MacBook Pro (16")
- Second monitor
- HP 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 for podcasts
- A globe that sits on my desk, which I refer to more often than you might expect
- Treadmill for under-desk gives me a few thousand extra steps per day
And what software?
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 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 for hosting online events in a way that's more fun than Zoom
- Zencastr for recording podcasts
- Google Sheets for quickly analyzing data + creating graphs
- Figma for all sorts of things
- Mailspring for email
- Pocket Casts for podcasts
- Lupa for practicing Spanish
- Intelligent Translator as a menu bar app for translation
- 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 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 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.