Zach Wilkins- Olson

Who I Am

I'm Zach.

I live in the Pacific Northwest and work in the behavioral health industry protecting and connecting sensitive data.

My work, ranging from production healthcare tools to open-source contributions, is centered on solving real-world problems for my community and beyond. Safely transmitting and storing your sensitive data is my first and main goal, and this mission has only grown more important as technology progresses down the unpredictable path it always takes. Always open to discussion and collaboration.

What I'm Working On and What I've Done

• Pond Spawn

  Artificial life simulation where agents with unique neural network brains evolve through genetic mutation. Each agent perceives its environment, makes decisions via a feedforward network (5→8→8→8→6), and passes mutated genomes to offspring. Built with Python, PyTorch, NumPy, Pygame, and Matplotlib.

  This is an ongoing project. I use this as a sort of sandbox for a prototyping ideas and testing out configurations. The most rewarding part of this has been my increased understanding of neural networks. I find it refreshing to be able to talk about convoluted neural networks and actually know what I'm talking about.

  Pond Spawn GitHub

• Pylint (Open Source Contributor)

  Contributed to the core static analysis engine of Pylint to improve inference accuracy. Engineered logic to correctly handle the control flow of unittest.TestCase.fail(), preventing false-positive 'used-before-assignment' errors. Additionally, refined the inference of pathlib.Path objects to ensure Pylint correctly identifies attributes on joined paths.

  What began as a class assignment wound up being an intense interest. Contributing to Pylint was very fun. Writing code is very rewarding, and systems design is great when you can build from scratch. However, reading and understanding a mature codebase is equally satisfying while being far less common work for me to encounter. In reviewing the Pylint control flow I gained some confidence in myself as a coder that I may have been lacking up to this point. Extremely friendly community and maintainers. If anyone is curious about contributing to an OSS project, there are worse repos to try it with.

  Issue #10785 - False positive unreachable error when overload + NoReturn is used

  Issue #10743 - Detect unittest.fail() calls for assignment warning

• Portfolio Website

  The source code for this portfolio site. A FastAPI app using Pydantic for config validation and Jinja2 for templating. Deployed on Azure App Service with CI/CD and custom domain setup.

  Website Source Code