Hi, my name is Zackary Morelli. Welcome to my personal website. I am a physicist by education and .NET web developer by trade. This website serves as a personal blog and also as a test bed for me to experiment with web development and server management. Feel free to look around. Links to my Github and LinkedIn accounts can be found in the footer at the bottom of this page. You may email me at ztrm@ztrm.net. If you would like to send me an encrypted email, you may download my PGP public key or view it on keys.openpgp.org. For secure messaging, feel free to message me on Signal.

I'm currently looking for a new .NET Web development job. I'm open to other roles as well, such as IT helpdesk jobs. Feel free to take a look at my resume if interested.

In addition to running a few websites on an Ubuntu, Nginx, .NET stack, I also run my own email server stack (which is very difficult to do these days). My email above on the ztrm.net domain is run by this email server. Although not end-to-end encrypted, I think email is a very powerful and still relevant tool for communication due to its openness and ubiquity. Even though tools like SendGrid make it easy for applications to send programmatic emails via an API, I think real email servers are useful because applications can use them to send emails programmatically, but human beings can use the same email accounts to both receive and send emails using a custom domain name. For sensitive or private communications with people you know, I strongly recommend that everyone use Signal for encrypted communication. Signal is a free and open-source application owned by a nonprofit that supports end-to-end encrypted messaging, voice calls, and video calls.

ztrm.net is a static .NET 8 Razor Pages web app, using PostgreSQL as a DB. It runs on an Ubuntu server with Nginx as a reverse proxy web server. I use Cloudflare as a Domain Registrar, DNS Provider, HTTP/S traffic proxying service, and as a Web Application Firewall. Even though Cloudflare is a large for-profit tech company, they are genuinely privacy-focused and provide these services for free. Domain names they sell at cost, which means they only charge the ICANN fee for domain registration. I highly recommend Cloudflare's platform to anyone looking to host websites or email servers on their own. The extra level of security they provide is valuable in the extremely dangerous world of the modern internet.

More recently, I've been learning Blazor, specifically Blazor Server, for Single Page Application (SPA) web development. Instead of learning one of the major traditional JS SPA frameworks like Angular and React, as a C#/.NET developer, I chose to learn Blazor as an introduction to SPA development, and I am very impressed. Blazor is simply a superior way of doing web development for C# web developers. It is extremely powerful and flexible. Whether you are building a simple static website or a highly interactive website, Blazor simply makes web development easier than Razor Pages or MVC. Blazor vastly reduces the amount of JS needed to build a website, even a highly dynamic one. Blazor Server uses WebSockets and an efficient diffing engine to quickly update dynamic websites while keeping everything server-side. Blazor WebAssembly offers the exciting possibility to run a .NET web app as a true client-side SPA by running the app in WebAssembly on the client and then using API controllers to provide data services to the client-side app— all while avoiding the slow and interpreted nature of JS. I firmly believe all .NET web developers should be using Blazor, and I hope that the tyrannical dominance of Angular will lessen in the coming years to allow Blazor a more prominent spot in the web development world that it deserves.

Below are some other websites I've made and operate:

• dallevamechanical.com - Simple .NET 8 Razor Pages web app I made for my cousin's HVAC company
• morelliwebservices.com - Simple business page and status dashboard for various websites and email infrastructure that I run.

Unusually Smooth Sections of Asteroid Itokawa

2026-06-30

Why are parts of this asteroid's surface so smooth? The answer seems likely to do with the dynamics of an asteroid that is a loose pile of rubble rather than a solid rock. The unusual asteroid Itokawa was visited by the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa in 2005 which imaged and documented its unusual structure and mysterious lack of craters. Analyses of the border regions between smooth and rugged sections indicate that jostling of the asteroid might be creating segregation between large and small rocks near the surface, like the Brazil nut effect. The robotic Hayabusa actually touched down on one of the smooth patches, dubbed the MUSES Sea, and collected soil samples. These samples were returned to Earth and are not only giving clues to the ancient history of this unusual asteroid, but also about the early years of our entire Solar System. Computer simulations show that 500-meter asteroid Itokawa may impact the Earth within the next few million years. Rocking Space: Today is Asteroid Day