Zachary Flower
Computer Science And Cybersecurity Instructor at Red Rocks Community College
Denver, Colorado, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolZachary Flower is a seasoned software engineer and engineering leader with 13 years of experience building backend systems, developer tooling, and scalable SaaS architectures from startups to enterprise. Based near Denver, he has led teams as Director of Software Engineering and Principal Engineer, driving initiatives like SOX-compliant continuous delivery, shift-left testing, multi-tenant SAML, and dramatic cloud cost and deployment-time reductions. A committed educator and adjunct instructor, he pairs hands-on technical leadership with curriculum development for high school and college learners, including a Wolfram-backed quantum computing lesson. An active open-source contributor, Zach has improved developer UX and robustness in prominent projects such as Vagrant and Composer, often adding features plus thorough test coverage. He blends deep backend expertise (PHP, APIs, CI/CD) with a writer’s clarity—publishing technical content and documentation for major DevOps vendors.
13 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science - BS, Computer Science, Bachelor of Science - BS, Computer Science at University of Colorado Boulder
Stackoverflow
56reputation
8kreached
2answers
0questions
Github Skills (25)
dependency-manager10
data-generation10
unit-testing10
test-driven-design10
mysql10
testing10
command-line-interface10
configuration-management10
faker10
ruby10
automation10
php10
php-framework10
database-design10
command-line10
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
fzaninotto/Faker
Aug 2017 - Nov 2017
Faker is a PHP library that generates fake data for you
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:12 commits, 4 PRs, 7 comments in 3 months
Contributions summary:Zachary contributed to the Faker PHP library by implementing features related to generating compliant US-based social security numbers (SSN) and employer identification numbers (EIN). They added new functionality and validated the output, writing tests to ensure the generated data conforms to the required formats. The user also refactored the code by removing and adding properties, and corrected existing test cases.
factorytestingphpdummy-datafaker
hashicorp/vagrant
Nov 2017 - Feb 2018
Vagrant is a tool for building and distributing development environments.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:13 commits, 3 PRs, 5 comments in 3 months
Contributions summary:Zachary primarily contributed to the `vagrant` project by adding new functionality and enhancing existing features related to the `init` command. This included implementing a `--template` option to customize Vagrantfile generation, and incorporating error handling. Furthermore, the user wrote and updated unit tests to validate the new functionality and ensure the robustness of the codebase, also adding tests to cover error cases. These changes focused on improving user experience and code quality.
vagrantansiblerubydockervirtualization
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