entry
; main()guest@navi:~$ ./greet --verbose
Zak Farrington // principal software engineer @ CarGurus
Eighteen years shipping software.
Building enterprise-grade distributed systems at scale.
about
; whoamiI learned to code by reverse engineering video games: reading and patching process memory, picking up C++, and writing my own tools. By high school I was contributing to an open-source MMORPG server project and running a busy server of my own. All for the love of building things, years before anyone paid me for it.
Now I'm a software engineer with 18 years of professional experience, specializing over the last five years in distributed systems. More than once, the products I've helped build have gone through multi-million-dollar acquisitions, and I led the engineering integration afterwards.
Day to day I design systems, keep quality high and lead complex initiatives across data, platform and product teams. I've also led agile teams as a tech lead.
// credentials & milestones
- 2025AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate
- 2024CarGurus Hackathon — 2× winner (Dealer Award & People’s Choice), an LLM-based chatbot
- 2021CarOffer Matrix™ — automated dealer trade platform, acquired by CarGurus
- 2016RedBumper — real-time vehicle appraisal tool, acquired by CDK Global (formerly ADP)
functions
; what I do / capabilitiesTechnical Leadership
Cross-team architecture, ADR authorship, unblocking and collaborating with engineers to keep quality high.
Full-Stack Engineering
End-to-end product work across .NET, Spring and React.
Cloud Architecture
Designing resilient, event-driven systems backed by AWS.
Applied GenAI
Building with agentic AI in my engineering workflows and learning GenAI & Bedrock on AWS.
Reverse Engineering
Eclectic background in decompilers, disassemblers, and memory tools.
Foundational discipline that came before the rest, and the reason I trust myself to dig into anything.
build_log
; demos & things I’ve made outside of work- 2026 staged anaismusic.com — artist storefront on a single Native AOT .NET binary
- 2026 hobby MRA: Reborn — rebuilding a lost online RPG from the original binaries
- 2024 demo Books-Collection — full-stack .NET 7 reference app, React + Redux front-end
- 2024 demo Net7-ETL-Bus — event-driven ETL service built on TPL Dataflow
- 2005 archived Screenshot Capture Utility — an early Windows app, written in C++ with MFC
- 2005 archived Process Killer — a small utility written in MASM32 assembly
anaismusic.com
; awaiting launch
Adieu Anaïs
A storefront for a working musician, served end to end by a single self-contained .NET 10 Native AOT binary running on Linux. No runtime to install, no JIT warm-up. It runs Stripe embedded checkout, signs short-lived download links, and hands merch off to Printful.
| Versus old WordPress site | old | new | |
|---|---|---|---|
| memory | 647 MB | 9.9 MB | 65× |
| disk | 753 MB | 34 MB | 22× |
| load | 2.2 s | 0.2 s | 11× |
| css + js | 42 | 2 | 21× |
mra_reborn
; for fun
MRA: Reborn
The Mystic Realms of Alhanzar was a tile-based online RPG that quietly disappeared years ago. I'm rebuilding it from the original binaries: decompiling the renderer, decoding the asset and map formats, and reconstructing the client tile-for-tile.
Featured image is real output from a reconstructed renderer, not a mock-up. It's slow, finicky work, and some of the most fun I have all week.
A non-commercial preservation project. The Mystic Realms of Alhanzar and its original assets belong to their creators; MRA: Reborn is unaffiliated and unendorsed.
old_school
; where it startedAs early as 2004 I was building programs in C++, from vanilla Win32 API to MFC, dabbling in MASM32 assembly and making game-memory tools, because I loved figuring out how everything worked.
I spent years building those skills for fun before I stumbled upon Ragnarok Online server emulation, contributing to the open-source eAthena project and starting a game server of my own. Thanks to a dedicated crew, it grew to 32,000+ international user accounts. I was learning to scale and build systems with a team, all before my first job.
A few things from the early days: