In this month's edition of "Driving Success", we're excited to shine a light on the powerhouse behind VIA's Front End and indispensable member of the Tranztec family — Zach Compton.

As the Director of Front End Development, Zach has significantly shaped the user interface of VIA and his influence and dedication can be seen throughout interface. With an impressive tenure of nearly seven years, his impact is undeniable.

Before joining Tranztec, Zach made his mark as a flash game designer racking up millions of users in a series of video games he designed. Off the clock, he's honing his golf skills and prioritizing time with his family.

To provide an insider's perspective, we turned to Russ Ladd, our Director of Backend Development. Here's what he had to share about his talented colleague:

"Zach is the kind of teammate everyone wishes for. He's approachable, always eager to lend a hand, and is perpetually ready to tackle challenges head-on. His profound understanding of our product isn't just beneficial—it's essential. Whether he's mapping out new features, guiding his peers, or identifying and resolving bugs, Zach's contribution is integral to the success of VIA."

Join us in celebrating Zach's achievements and in looking forward to many more successes together at Tranztec.

TRANZTEC: Please for the record here, what is your title?
Zach Compton: Title officially is director of front end development.
TRANZTEC: Tell us a synopsis of what you do.
Zach Compton: I help manage the full stack development of our web applications. I mean, I also do coding. I do development work. I manage a team of like three or four people; to handle deployment stuff.
Tranztec: How long have you been at Tranztec?
Zach Compton: So I think at the end of this year, I'll be seven years. Like in December I'll be seven years so I've been here like six and a half years.
Tranztec: What path led you here in terms of you know, what, just tell us a little bit about like, I know you worked at RadioShack etc. But what was it like what made little Zach get to where he is right now?
Zach Compton: A wanted to do software and web development and our product VIA paved the way for that.
Tranztec: Were you always just interested in software development then?
Zach Compton: Yes, yeah, I've been coding since I was like 12.
Tranztec: Yeah. Was that video games or what was it that sparked your interest?
Zach Compton: Okay. Yeah, I used to do flash games. I used to build Flash games back in the day.
Tranztec: Until Apple destroyed your dreams of being a Flash developer.
Zach Compton: Until Apple destroyed my dreams. It is very true. When Steve Jobs wanted that cold hard cash in the App Store and flash games are a way to circumvent that
Tranztec: All that learning went down the tubes, you know,
Zach Compton: Well, not really. But I made my money when I could.
Tranztec: I love it. What are your thoughts on some of the latest industry trends like AI?
Zach Compton: My opinions on a AI, okay, so I think AI is going to play a very important part. It's going to play a very important part in our daily lives. Is it where it needs to be to do that? It's not quite there yet. We're almost there. Is there ways that we could utilize it as a company? I think so. But it's going to take a lot of work for us to get there.
Tranztec: However, does it concern you at all as you employ developers that they may be looking to copy-pasta stuff from AI? How do you feel about that?
Zach Compton: So experienced developers, no. Developers that are newer and less experienced? Absolutely. Because so as an experienced developer, it's a great tool to use. But it's wrong a lot. And you're not going to know if it's wrong unless you know why it's wrong. And you can actually analyze code and junior devs are not great at doing that. So, like people that are just starting out writing code and building apps and stuff like that you should stay away. Or at least minimum stick to asking it questions and not so much asking it to write code for you.
Tranztec: How much do you use AI just in your life? Are you playing around with it outside of work?
Zach Compton: Oh, I literally use AI every single day. So when I'm writing code we use GitHub copilot here. At least my team does. And like literally it will autocomplete and come up with code for you as you're writing code. And it's extremely useful. So I literally use it every single day.  ChatGPT is helpful as well. Every now and then. Not so much. But no, I don't really use it for personal use. It's really for professional stuff. 
Tranztec: Are there any emerging technologies or programming language you're interested in? That you haven't dealt with?
Zach Compton: Um, not so much programming languages, there is a new one, a Python subset that isn't released yet. It is called Mojo. So there's this new language but it's really just Python at the end of the day. But it's more low level and it doesn't suck at writing code. That looks interesting. Besides that, you know, we're looking at possibilities of using things like message brokers and MQ platforms like rabbit MQ or Kafka or Azure event hubs for handling our very large data needs that Tranztec has.
Tranztec: Do you have a guilty pleasure or something you are low key embarrassed for other people to know?
Zach Compton: I'm a top 1% listener of Selena Gomez, music on Spotify.
Tranztec: Exactly how much Selena Gomez music must one listen to get to be a one percenter?
Zach Compton: That's a good question. It's probably a lot of hours honestly. Yeah.
Tranztec: Were you just in your feels and you just let it run over and over again?
Zach Compton: I like crappy pop music when I'm working. I do. What can I say?
Tranztec: Lol, What's one of your favorite memories about your time at Tranztec?
Zach Compton: The Christmas parties! The Christmas parties are awesome. Because it was all stuff you would never buy for yourself but like they were all really good gifts.
Tranztec: I think you started right before Christmas.
Zach Compton: I did. I literally did. I started just the week before. And we had our Christmas party and I'm like this place is freaking awesome.
Tranztec: Yeah, it was good. Good timing for you.
Zach Compton: Yeah, I got a bunch of free Alexa equipment.
Tranztec: So what's something you're proud of that is not on your resume?
Zach Compton: So another fun fact is so you know I made Flash games right? One of my  flash games hit, I think it was 80 million unique impressions, or something like that.
Tranztec: Nice. Yeah. What kind of game was it?
Zach Compton:  I don't wanna... (Editor Note: Long Pause, The intensity builds) see that's the problem. I don't want to say what game it was.
Tranztec: Interesting...Is it still available to be played?
Zach Compton: Yes, It was called the Stupid Test. 
Tranztec: The Stupid Test?
Zach Compton: Yeah, that was my big claim to fame. Stupid Test. Stupid Test Five hit number one on the Apple App Store for a while. 
(Stupid Test Five)
Tranztec: So was there five versions? Or was that just the name of it and there was more than five?
Zach Compton: So there's many stupid tests. There's two. There's three. There's four. There's four and a half. There's five and then there's ultimatum. Five was the most popular one though.
Tranztec: Well, very cool. Dang Steve Jobs. I don't know what to tell ya. Your career got sidetracked.
Zach Compton: It's all right.
Tranztec: I think that's a fun fact. Career sidetracked by Steve Jobs.
Zach Compton: That's happened to a lot of people.
Tranztec: If you woke up tomorrow with superpowers, what would they be?
Zach Compton: Can I pick multiple powers?
Tranztec: You can do whatever you want, I don't make the rules.
Zach Compton: I never have to sleep. That's a really good one. Never have sleep. So therefore I'm never tired. I love that. That's a big one.
Tranztec: See, this is a very practical superpower.
Zach Compton: Oh, yeah. I all of a sudden picked up on Tiger Woods golf game and I can golf as good as Tiger Woods. So therefore everybody that I golf with, I can just destroy them that'd be fine.
Tranztec: What is the one thing you wish people knew about your job? Going back to work on that one.
Zach Compton: Okay, one thing I wish people knew about my job.
Tranztec: That it's hard.
Zach Compton: Well, I was about to say how easy it is.
Tranztec: If they only knew.
Zach Compton: you know this is this is a tough one. One thing I wish people know. Wow, this one stumped me.
Tranztec: I feel like you have so many job roles and responsibilities that it can be hard to explain.
Zach Compton: Well, here's the thing like, I don't really care if people actually know what I do at the end of the day; so long as they don't call it IT. Because my wife tells people what she's thinks I do, she’s like, oh, yeah, he's a software developer. Then the people at her work always apparently say oh, so he's in IT.
Tranztec: Yeah. So you can fix my computer.
Zach Compton: Yeah, that's not what I do. I mean, I can do that.
Tranztec: But you'd begrudgingly be doing it.
Zach Compton: Call me anything you want just don’t call me IT.
Zach Compton: I should point that out I do golf too. Like once or twice a week, I golf.
Tranztec: What is your best round ever?
Zach Compton: Best round ever? 99 at Eagle’s Landing. First time I broke 100. I haven't done it since, but I broke it once at Eagle.
Tranztec: Do you have, Is there a course that you've played, that stands out like as your favorite place to play?
Zach Compton: I love Maumee Bay. Maumee Bay is a 20 minute drive from me and that course is always in great condition. I mean, it's a beautiful course and it's actually got like, there's like hills there, you know?
Tranztec: How long have you been playing golf?
Zach Compton: I have been playing golf. Like on a weekly basis now for probably about actually I shouldn't say weekly basis. Well, weekly basis during the summer months for like for two years now. I'm a COVID golfer. I picked it up during COVID. Okay, or, sorry, more 2021. So I've really only been playing kind of relatively serious for about two years.
Tranztec: What made you pick up golf? What do you like about it?
Zach Compton: Friends. My friends have been playing it for a while and I just started tagging along and now it's just what I do.
Tranztec: When you get into a hobby like this, are you the type of person who's like, you know, I got these clubs at this garage sale, or do you go out and buy the $1200 clubs?
Zach Compton: So  I started with a cheap second hand me down stuff my dad had. It doesn't really matter what your clubs are if you can't even hit the ball. So like I didn't really upgrade my irons until I was hitting the ball better. And then I upgraded to like a used set. I did not buy a brand new set of irons. I'm not going to until I am hitting the ball better. Like I was using a super junky driver for a long time until I started fixing my slice quite a bit. And then once I did that, you know I rewarded myself the new driver. But I'm also not into the $500 driver range stuff. Like I got a PXG for a deal it like 300 or 250 bucks, and that was brand new. I was happy about that, but I am not the golfer that goes out and spends $1,500 on a bag every year.
Tranztec: Is there something in particular that you're excited to get to work on next
Zach Compton: We're going to be doing a large change to our tech stack on new apps going forward it is going to give us an opportunity to focus on building something new, and I am looking forward to that.

Tranztec: Well, Thanks Zach for taking the time to talk to us and congratulations again on being this months Driving Success recipient. 

Tranztec has made a donation to Holy Family Communications in Zach's name. 
Holy Family Communications is a 501(c)3 non-profit charitable organization and you may learn more about at https://holyfamilyradio.fm/.