Hayden Porter‑Aylor _

origin

From reactors to repos.

I started as a Nuclear Electronics Technician in the US Navy. My classroom was a reactor compartment; my homework was the kind of instrumentation where the wrong reading at the wrong time is a very bad day. Watchstanding, two-person verification, casualty drills, pre-task briefs, after-action review — that's where the discipline came from. I still believe what I wrote on the first version of this page: the power of a reactor pales in comparison to a well-crafted line of code. The watchstanding habits transferred directly. Code review is a pre-task brief. On-call is a casualty drill. A clean rollback is the same muscle as a clean reactor scram.

founding

Hardware, finance, web3, founder.

After the Navy I took a short detour into industrial Bitcoin mining at Foundry Digital — racks of ASICs, immersion tanks, the brutal arithmetic of difficulty adjustments and power $/kWh. It was the first place I saw a software stack and a hardware stack as one organism instead of two. That mental model has shaped every infra decision I've made since.

Then back to software: PMG, USAA, and ConsenSys, where I worked across the Web3 product surface and started speaking publicly at Permissionless and EthGlobal on developer experience and supply-chain risk. The Rusty Pipes research came out of that window — published, then turned into a series, then into the talk I keep getting invited to give.

Today I'm founder and CEO of Zera Labs. We build privacy-preserving cryptographic infrastructure on Solana, plus the tooling to make it usable by humans and by AI agents. The story of why any of this is interesting is in the founding letter.

now

What Zera Labs ships.

Five repos do most of the talking: zera-sdk (Rust core, TypeScript surface, MCP server for AI agents), zera-wallet-demo (Tauri 2 desktop, Groth16 in WASM), z_trade (zeraswap — first compressed-token AMM on Solana), zera_med_demo (a ZK-FHIR gateway because someone dared me to prove privacy works for something other than crypto bros), and zeracoin. The visual language is the Zera Design System v3, which is the same system this blog now runs on.

For what's on the bench right now and what's queued for next quarter, the /now page and the /roadmap are the source of truth.

writing

Why this blog exists.

Skill Issue Dev is the trade journal for whichever problem I'm currently chewing on. Some weeks that's a supply-chain malware writeup. Some weeks it's a 14-minute scaffolding sprint on the SDK. Some weeks it's a founder note. The throughline: I write to demystify the complex, share the epiphanies of a late-night coding session, and own the work in public. Browse the /blog if you want the full archive, or the series index if you want a guided arc.