Zach Wilson

Here’s everything you need to know to pass the SQL data engineer interview in big tech!

Data Expert 3 Year Anniversary Live! x.com/i/broadcasts/1…

@tech__unicorn After ten years here, it’s overrated. It truly is propaganda with less substance

I'm starting to fall for this "move to sf" propaganda

Every Claude Code session, OpenClaw session, and LangChain will be graded for you in the AI boot camp starting this week. Learn how to prompt better Learn how to use fewer tokens to get the same result Learn how to prevent serious security issues while developing AI applications Send me a DM with the words “I’m in” to get a discount for the March 31st boot camp!

Europe being asleep at the AI wheel is going to imporverish them and India will step up and take the wheel

@Jelitics You’re so cooked

Just bet $300K on Luka Doncic to underperform tonight. Payout = $2,100,000

Training Pi0.5 to control the SO-100 is 65% complete and the model has seen 6,500 robot demonstrations across hundreds of different tasks. Loss is trending down from from 0.39 to 0.08 and expected to complete tomorrow. I started this project while staying in @eczachly's creator house for NVIDIA GTC, running local scale ups on my GPU rig to validate before committing to the cloud run. After driving my computer 300 miles home I discovered it no longer had functioning internet or keyboard IO. Todays task will be fixing the computer before training completes so I am able to test the model on my SO-100. I'll post results tomorrow

After exactly 110 days, my SaaS product passed the $1,000 MRR mark! 🎉 I wanted to document my learnings in the hope that it'll help others reach this milestone too (hopefully faster than I did). My ultimate goal is to grow my product to $10k MRR and document the entire process. As it continues to scale I'll try to continue sharing what I learn along the way. Here are the biggest takeaways I've learned from going from $0 MRR to $1,000 MRR in 110 days: 1⃣ Build a Solution for Your Own Problem I've realized that there are many times that I've thought about building something (or even started) but for the wrong reasons. Oftentimes people (myself included) will be attacted to an idea due to the possibility of making a certain ROI. While there's nothing wrong with making money it's important to realize that there are infinite ways to make money so don't become fixated on "shiny" ideas. Instead, solve a real problem that you are the customer of. Doing this is imporant for 2 reasons: 1. You'll deeply understand your customers' problems 2. Since it's a problem you experience, you'll be motivated to deliver a solution Both these points are extremely important especially when you're building solo. It's very unlikely you'll be able to deliver a valuable solution if you aren't solving a problem you experience and understand. Additionally, it's very likely at the beginning of your journey you'll have little extrinsic motivation to continue working: you won't have an abundance of customers, you likely won't be making lots of money etc. Because of this, having the motivation to solve your own problem will be good fuel to ensure you keep going; which bring me to my next learning of 2⃣ Consistency > Everything Else If there's anything you take away from this post let it be this: consistently working on your product is everything. I mean this in a general sense, not necessarily coding. There will be many days where it feels like nothing is changing, but having these boring days is what will eventually set you up for success. It's kinda funny because it's almost like you need to reach an inflection point where things actually start to matter but getting to this point requires a certain activation energy that 99% of people aren't willing to put in. Don't think that because things are sleepy with your application you're failing it's actually just part of the journey so try and learn to enjoy it. Because of this, what matters way more than seeing specific metrics initially is building habits that you can control that are good for you and your product. For example, you can control how many cold DMs you sent in a day to market your product, you can't control how many users sign up for your product. Every day I write a list of things that I want to get done for my product whether it's related to engineering or marketing (or anything else). But every item on my list is something that I directly control. 3⃣ Minimize Scope: You Need Users Not Features What's funny about this advice is that it's something I tried to index on from other lessons I had read online but I still failed. I think a good litmus test for this is doing the following exercise: 1. Describe your product in 5 words or less 2. Launch with 1 feature that embodies this description My theory about why I strugged with cutting scope is that I (like many others) love building things. I'd actually argue that after you have your MVP functioning, any additional building you do is just active procrastination. It feels good and it feels productive, but it's not actually what you should be indexing on. Build the smallest possible thing and launch and then start talking about it. 4⃣ Marketing is Actually the Difficult (and Important) Part Having the ability to build things used to be a moat, but now, almost anyone can build something. Because of this what matters is how you distribute and market what you build. At the beginning of your journey, marketing is just as important, if not more important, than actually building your product. If I'm being brutally honest with myself I think I shied away from marketing because I wasn't comfortable about talking about what I was building -- because talking about it meant people would know about it and if people knew about it they could know that it might fail. My best advice here is to force yourself to do marketing even if it's uncomfortable and the best way to do this is by making marketing an integral part of your daily activities. I started posting about my product on my socials even though it felt uncomfortable. I also made it a goal to tell 10 new people about my product every single day. The best part about doing this is that now I don't feel uncomfortable talking about my product anymore. Forcing yourself to post will make you realize that no one really cares in the first place (which should be liberating to you) 5⃣ Trials are Worth More Than Subscriptions One of my biggest lessons was to give users trials of your product. Countless things in my product were born out of users being able to try my product and then tell me: 1. What they liked 2. What they didn't like 3. What the product didn't have that they wanted Because of this, every trial in the early days of your product, is worth multiple times more than the $30 you might get from their subscription. Give them out liberally. Not only will trialing users give you ideas of what to build they'll expose ways that users who aren't you are using and thinking about your product. Many of the bugs I've uncovered in my application have also come out of trialing users interacting with my product in ways I didn't think of. Trials also give you an interesting insight into perceived value of your product; pay attention to the percentage at which trialing users convert and try to gleen why users don't continue with their subscription if they cancel. tl;dr 1. be your own customer 2. do something every day 3. aggressively cut scope 4. marketing >= building 5. give trials liberally i hope this helps! :D

I’m glad I relied on StackOverflow for regexes long enough so that AI can do them for me now and I can avoid learning them entirely. What skill do you feel smart avoiding learning because AI can now do it?

@autumnwritesya Congrats on being part of the other half

@EcZachly Met my husband there so it worked for me idk

Half of the men in San Francisco reach age 40 without ever getting married. This number is 35% in NYC and 25% for the US average. San Francisco is the worst place in the entire country to: - find love - start a family - raise children Some people are like, "Zach, why would you ever leave San Francisco? It is YOUR city!" This sacrifice was something I was willing to make IF IT WAS WORTH IT. And after seeing multiple VC rejections, it's like, okay, time to stop putting off my family and kids and actually start taking that aspect of my life seriously. Do I feel lost in this pursuit? Absolutely. I lived in San Francisco for 10 years, and forging this new identity is a lot. I will look back on this painful time with pride when I have a family and kids.

@nolongermain @ZachWilson plz respond

zach wilson… 4th and 9… 🤔

Built an open source Activity Monitor replacement for macOS that actually tells you what's eating your battery. groups processes by app, shows energy impact, and has a built-in MCP server so AI agents can query your system. terminal-native, zero electron. (Link in comments)

@bentaylordata Love seeing you on X

@lil_boo_slayer @Market_Mirage Live stream 100m people at the same time is. Video streaming and live video streaming are very different.

@EcZachly @Market_Mirage Video streaming is not a new problem

When I worked at Netflix a guy on the reliability team got fired for losing the 4th 9. Are we even trying anymore?

@thedevchandra DataExpert.io

Let's do something fun today: Roasting landing pages. Drop yours, will roast as many as I can.

Please join my AI boot camp that starts March 31st! You get 50M tokens to burn! DataExpert.io/IACCEPT

@SVerax2395 @SathishPrasadVT DataExpert.io/IACCEPT gets you 30% off

@SathishPrasadVT @EcZachly I’m in!

The March 31st AI boot camp will be amazing! Here’s what the 5 weeks will look like Week 1: - Zach Wilson - teaches custom AI agents with LangChain, MCP, and how to get started Week 2: - Kevin Naughton - teaches how to optimize your dev workflow with Claude Code and Codex. How to create bug free code with these AI tools Week 3: - Carly Taylor and Drew Maring - teach OpenClaw and automating business processes. You’ll understand when to pick OpenClaw vs NemoClaw vs Claude Cowork Week 4: - Delia Lazarescu - teaches preventing catastrophic failures with OpenClaw and measuring actual business value from your AI agents Week 5: - Zach Wilson - teaches end-to-end AI application including deploy, CI/CD, evaluations, monitoring, and cost usage Alongside this content will be 5 additional pre-recorded modules on: - prompt engineering - auto prompt optimization with dspy - RAG and context engineering - how to make MCP work for you, not against you - LLMOps and guaranteeing quality in production - n8n workflows and end-to-end AI This will be the best AI boot camp of 2026. Spend April to become AI literate! Comment “I’m in” to get sent a discount for this! P.s. We offer additional discounts for companies looking to buy many seats!

@jjj1962051 DataExpert.io/IACCEPT

Each student will be given a 50M token budget to work with during the AI boot camp on March 31st. The models they can work with: - Claude Sonnet, Claude Haiku - GPT-4o, GPT-4o-mini They can use Codex or Claude Code for free. This is ~$250 worth of tokens to learn with! Over a billion tokens will be burned by students in April to make Jensen Huang proud!

@lbj_2317 DataExpert.io/IACCEPT

@EcZachly I’m in