Zach Wilkins- Olson

Who I Am

I build the backend systems that keep organizations moving. With a background in healthcare IT and a focus on Python-driven simulations and APIs, I create software that balances immediate utility with long-term stability.

I believe that as technology evolves unpredictably, our tools must be built with clarity and correctness at their core. My work, ranging from production healthcare tools to open-source contributions, is centered on solving real-world problems for my community and beyond. I am a firm believer in the power of remote-first collaboration and pragmatic engineering to solve the world's most unpredictable problems.

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.

  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.

  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