I'm an engineer, open-sourcer, digital nomad, and ride-or-die TypeScripter.

I got into open-source while trying to start a medical record software company as a solo developer. Sadly, the business side never took off, but the technical challenges I encountered have kept me busy for years now :) Managing the complexity of an app with over 200 highly-connected tables made the limitations of current API design and state management tools exceedingly clear.

My open-source projects are tools I built to manage all this complexity, but they're broadly useful to anyone who wants to build APIs in a type-safe, reliable way.

I built and currently maintain Zod — a TypeScript schema validation library with advanced type inference. It lets you define data structures (tuples, arrays, and objects), compose them with logical operators (unions, intersections), and generate variants (pick, omit, etc). Check out the launch blog post at https://colinhacks.com/essays/zod.

I'm currently working full time on Zod 2, which I think will be the most humane and flexible multi-functional data modeling/transformation/casting library in the TypeScript ecosystem. I plan to use Zod as a foundation to build better tools for API design and state management, starting with an end-to-end typesafe RPC framework that validates all inputs and outputs at runtime, lets you implement statically-typed resolvers, and can auto-generate a client SDK — no configuration necessary.

Sponsorship at any level is massively, life-alteringly, world-shatteringly appreciated! 🙏