Hi there 👋

My name is Zander and I make things for the web.

Important

💼 I'm looking for my next role! I'm a product engineer with 18 years of experience, specialising in front-end development and design systems, and I'm available for work from mid-July 2026. If you think I'd be a good fit for your team, email me or take a look at zander.wtf first.

🛠 What I've been working on recently

• ZUI — a CSS-first UI library with design tokens, a layered architecture, and optional React, Astro, Solid & Vue components. No build step required.
• Otter — my self-hosted bookmarking app: links, articles, videos and half-watched TV shows, saved and tagged on your own infrastructure. It now has a native SwiftUI iOS app alongside the browser, Raycast and terminal clients.
• astro-d1-search — full-text site search for Astro backed by Cloudflare D1 and SQLite FTS5. Build-time indexing, an injected /api/search endpoint, and no third-party service.
• Flora — every plant in our house and garden, written up: what it wants, when it flowers, and what needs doing to it before the frost.
• Reps — a daily JavaScript coding puzzle. Solve one function a day in your browser.
• Free Fonts — a curated showcase of free, high-quality typefaces to browse and preview.
• Simmer — a recipe management app.
• zander.wtf — my website/portfolio/blog, built with Astro, where I write about things like the CSS features powering ZUI, my zero-to-one tech stack, and evaluating AI agents through side projects.
• zed-stack-starter — a modern full-stack React starter: Postgres + better-auth + Drizzle ORM, deployed to Cloudflare Workers.
• zed-astro-starter — an opinionated Astro starter with ZUI, ready to deploy to Cloudflare Workers.
• My lab — experiments, little tools and things in progress: a drawing app, a keyboard-only navigation demo, a data transformation dojo, a draggable 24-hour clock and more.
• A flurry of small tools and libraries:
  • react-status-bar — a portal-based status bar system for React
  • Spotify Favourites — find your actual favourite artists, not just the biggest play counts
  • Lang Compare — programming language features side-by-side
  • Surround for Zed — a Zed extension written in Rust. Never made it into the extension store, so it's a work in progress: clone the repo and install it locally to use it
  • npm packages like strifx, xtractr, url-merge and kit
  • my various Raycast extensions

Many of these were built while putting AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Amp) through their paces on real work — I wrote about that in Things I've been building recently while evaluating AI agents.

✍️ Recently on my blog

• What should actually go in your CLAUDE.md? — The guidance contradicts itself and almost none of it is dated, so here's a map of who says what, what the research supports, and how AGENTS.md fits in
• astro-d1-search: site search for Astro in one integration — I extracted the search implementation I built for this site into an npm package, so you can add full-text search to your own Astro site
• Building site search with Astro and Cloudflare D1 — Replacing Algolia on this very website with a self-owned, full-text search API built on Cloudflare D1 and SQLite FTS5, searchable from the site itself and from Raycast
• text-wrap, overflow-wrap and word-break: which one do I actually want? — A practical guide to CSS's confusingly-similar text wrapping and breaking properties, and when to reach for each one
• The Otter ecosystem — One bookmarking app, many faces. A tour of the web app, browser extensions, iOS share extension, Raycast extension, terminal UI, and desktop experiment that make up Otter
• The ZUI ecosystem — The tooling that has grown up around my CSS-first UI library: framework components, a VS Code extension, a Raycast extension, and a publishable Astro docs theme

🔨 Recently shipped

• zed-ios-app-starter — A SwiftUI and SwiftData starter for native iOS apps: tabs, onboarding, preferences and theming, with no third-party dependencies
• astro-d1-search released on npm — My site search is now an Astro integration on npm, and this site runs on the package instead of its own copy of the code
• A native iOS app for Otter — A native SwiftUI app for Otter with no web views anywhere, disk-cached bookmarks, and saving from the share sheet, deep links or Shortcuts
• Site-wide search + Raycast extension — Full-text search backed by Cloudflare D1 and FTS5 with no third-party service, plus a Raycast extension built on its JSON API
• Lab experiments + ZUI playground — New lab experiments including an endless, self-generating page, which also became a procedural playground in the ZUI docs
• Letterboxd watchlist for Radarr — A Radarr-compatible endpoint that serves my Letterboxd watchlist as an import list. Add a film, and it's ready to grab

Both lists update automatically from my feeds.

👨���💻 Work

• 🚀 Most recently I've been a Staff Software Engineer and web team lead at Dare, maintaining and evolving their energy trading platform and building a new component library.
• I've worked for a wide variety of startups, agencies and companies like Fathom, Utopia Music, Babylon Health, Digital Futures, Heights, Curve and FairFX amongst others.
• 💬 Ask me about design systems, AI-assisted development, or what I think of React
• 📫 How to reach me: email or Bluesky
• 😄 Pronouns: he/him/his
• ⚡ Fun fact: I used to be an assistant cameraman and worked on many TV shows, documentaries and one movie

Interests and hobbies

• 🏌️‍♂️ Golf
• 🚵‍♂️ Mountain biking
• Making 🍕 Pizza & 🍖🔥 BBQ
• 🍿 Movies
• 🥁 Drumming
• 💖 Salted Caramel

Tip

Feel free to say hello, fork my code or read my blog or checkout my blog/portfolio at zander.wtf