Hi | Hola | 你好

I'm Jorge Zaccaro, but I sometimes use the Chinese name 张豪, and the hacker name boolpath.

Welcome to my docs.

About me

I'm a software engineer and Internet entrepreneur from Colombia. I love reading books, learning languages and designing abstractions. My work revolves around monetary economics for digital currencies, and hypertext tools for knowledge graphs. My dream is to stay humble and true to my spiritual roots as I strive to make gifts of knowledge to humanity.

Background

Cultural

I was born in the Caribbean city of Santa Marta, where addressing each other informally and fast-speaking are the norm. But my family and I moved to San José (Costa Rica) when I was two years old, and there I learned to speak slow using the formal pronoun "usted" instead of "tú" for the second person singular (you). Five years later when I moved back to Colombia, I had to learn the accent and adjust to the culture of my own hometown! It took around five more years for me to be able to address people by the informal "tú", but to this day I cannot do so with one of my brothers who grew up with me there. It somehow still feels uncomfortable, so weird, like an unbridgeable distance created by a tiny word.

I guess that's where my fascination for languages and cultures comes from. Language shapes the mind in ways we yet not fully understand. Culture as a whole shapes our identity as individuals. When you learn a new language, or even the accent or words of a new culture, you have this rare opportunity to discover new parts of yourself and expand your mind in new directions. You can continue to understand who you are as you speak and interact with others. Living in China for three years was one of my most transformative experiences so far, but I look forward to discover more of myself and better understand others as I continue to learn their languages and experience their cultures around the world.

Academic

I studied electronic engineering in Spanish, my native language, at Javeriana University in Bogotá, Colombia. I never knew exactly why I chose that major—besides wanting to enjoy the language of math without proving theorems—but it all made sense when I was exposed to digital electronics and discovered my passion for computing. By taking courses on digital design, microprocessor architecture, embedded software, FPGAs and RTOS, I gradually moved up the computing stack and ultimately transitioned from hardware to software. My undergraduate thesis was about using neural networks for the pattern recognition of imagined hand movements captured with EEG-based brain-computer interfaces, and my graduate thesis was a distributed system architecture for scaling out virtual worlds using a process similar to cellular handover.

Years later I studied economics in Chinese, my favorite natural language, at Renmin University in Beijing, China. I enrolled in a Chinese-taught program aiming to master the language itself, which had proved difficult using conventional methods based on repetition of irrelevant words. I chose economics because I was familiar with the concepts and terminology thanks to previous work on monetary theory and cryptocurrencies. During that time, I discovered that the Chinese language is so hard to learn because it is actually a graph! Yet we are still trying to organize courses linearly using list-based methods that mostly cover the words alone, but not the multitude of links between them. That realization triggered my obsession with hypertext history, and lead to my current work on knowledge graphs to enhance learning.

Contact

You can find me on Twitter @jorgezaccaro. My DMs are open, so feel free to reach out!