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entry

; main()

zak@navi:~$ ./greet --verbose

Zak Farrington // principal software engineer

Eighteen years building software. Principal Engineer at CarGurus.
Working on enterprise-grade distributed systems at scale.

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about

; whoami

I started out reverse engineering video games and poking at process memory, which led me to learn C++ and write my own tools. By high school I was contributing to an open-source MMORPG server project and running a busy server of my own. Every bit of it 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. Day to day that means designing systems, keeping software quality high, and helping complex projects ship, across the whole stack: backend services, front-end apps, and the infrastructure. I'm collaborative by default. I've led agile teams and worked as a tech lead, where the real work is the team you make faster.

// certifications & awards

Zak Farrington
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functions

; what I do / capabilities
fn lead()

Technical Leadership

Guiding architecture decisions, mentoring, unblocking and collaborating with engineers, and keeping quality high.

fn build()

Full-Stack Engineering

End-to-end product work in .NET/C#, Java, React and TypeScript.

fn deploy()

Cloud Architecture

Designing resilient, event-driven systems backed by AWS.

fn infer()

Applied GenAI

Implementing agentic AI across my engineering workflows while learning GenAI & Bedrock on AWS.

fn reverse()

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.

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build_log

; demos & things I’ve made outside of work
  • 2026 pre-alpha MRA: Reborn — rebuilding a lost online RPG from the original binaries
  • 2024 live Books-Collection — full-stack .NET 7 reference app, React + Redux front-end
  • 2024 live 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

→ and more on GitHub

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mra_reborn

; for fun
A sector of The Mystic Realms of Alhanzar rendered by the reconstructed engine
output: reconstructed renderer — “Inn of the Undead” sector

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.

Link Coming Soon

A non-commercial preservation project. The Mystic Realms of Alhanzar and its original assets belong to their creators; MRA: Reborn is unaffiliated and unendorsed.

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old_school

; where it started

As early as 2004 I was building Windows apps in C++, from raw Win32 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, we grew it to over 32,000 international user accounts. I was learning to scale systems, and to build alongside a team, all before my first job.

A few things from the early days:

2004 Planet Source Code, Coding Contest Award 2006 eAthena Dev Team, Top Honours 2005 Screenshot utility in C++ / MFC 2005 Process Killer in MASM32
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contact

; exit(0)

Drop me a line.

You can find me on these platforms.

LinkedIn GitHub