ZW-2026STEREO
Zara
Walker
Includes the hit singleVera+ 8 more tracks
Writing · Marketing · Building
The writer who builds. The marketer who ships. The music head who still buys vinyl.
I’ve been writing for a living for seventeen years: bylines for HuffPost, brand voice for Dove, NOW TV and Iceland, and a lot of copy you’ll never know was mine. These days I run marketing for eight music brands at once, with 37 social accounts and a weekly newsletter I still write by hand.
In my own time I make things. Nine of them are live, listed below like a tracklist, and I built the APIs and MCP servers that let Claude work inside them with me. Tap one for the liner notes. I’m open to new roles, in the Netherlands, the UK or remote.
Hover the cover to pull the record.
Side A
Things I made. Every one is live, and the numbers are real.
A1Veraan audio engine1,137 songs
Type any song. She tells you what she hears, and how sure she is.
My own audio engine. Tempo, key, the feel, and the things a musician would notice, next to the real facts about the record. Every answer is labelled as measured, her read, or a catalogue fact. I put her through a blind exam of 1,137 songs and published the scores, misses and all. She runs on her own remote server, on free everything.
1,137 songs, blind exam · 24/24 keys, on test loops · 92% tempo, within half/double
Engineered with
Python, FastAPI, CLAP, librosa, scikit-learn, MusicBrainz + AcoustID, Cloudflare tunnel, GitHub Actions
What I had to work out
- A blind evaluation harness plus torture tests for pitch, speed, loudness and compression, published with the misses
- Spotted a genre bias in an off-the-shelf model and replaced it with one I trained (genre family now 68% on unseen songs)
- Confidence labels on every answer: measured, model read, or catalogue fact
- A voice guide so her plain-English readouts sound like a person, not a spec sheet
- Always-on hosting for $0: the tunnel rotates, the site redeploys itself
A2everysongfree music, matched3,362 tracks
Upload an mp3. Get equivalent Creative Commons free music in seconds.
Every track is measured on 13 traits, tempo, key, energy, vibe, the lot, then matched against a catalogue I licence-checked by hand and by script, so the swap actually sounds like the song you couldn’t license. Built for video editors, podcasters and indie filmmakers. Free, no account. Started at five dollars, learned that was the wrong call, made it free instead. It now has a partner API and an MCP server, so other tools and AI agents can use it too.
3,362 licence-checked tracks · 13 traits per song · 10 partner API endpoints
Engineered with
Python, FastAPI, CLAP audio embeddings, librosa, Demucs, Fly.io, Cloudflare Pages + D1, Stripe, Resend, FastMCP
What I had to work out
- Audio similarity search: AI embeddings of every track, matched in memory in seconds
- A licence pipeline that only admits commercial-safe tracks and re-checks them over time
- A tiered, rate-limited partner API, an MCP server with 7 tools and a Claude Skill
- Vocal removal in production on a CPU, kept fast by capping clips at 45 seconds
- Cold starts handled for $0: the server warms up on real user actions, not a paid cron
A3Hi-Fi Kitchenhi-fi and kitchen reviews1,018 posts
Tested in real kitchens, listened to on real systems.
My blog since 2011. It started as family life, recipes and travel, picked up more than a hundred sponsored partnerships along the way, and is now Hi-Fi Kitchen: honest reviews of the headphones, mics, turntables and kitchen kit I actually own. Behind the scenes it runs itself: affiliate links, cover images and the rest of the publishing pipeline are automated, and new posts go out twice a week at 9am. It pays its way through affiliate links that every post declares up front.
1,018 posts published · 15 years running · 102 sponsored posts
Engineered with
WordPress, Rank Math SEO, llms.txt, Jetpack, Mailchimp, Amazon Associates, Site Kit, MCP + API
What I had to work out
- An automated publishing pipeline: affiliate linking, cover images and scheduling handled end to end
- Affiliate links added automatically, with plain disclosure at the top of every post
- Generated waveform cover art for each new post
- Turned a 15-year-old lifestyle blog into a focused review site without losing its history
- Set up for AI search as well as Google: llms.txt alongside structured SEO
A4Marketing Prompt Hubprompts for marketers46 articles
A library of prompts I wished existed when I was running the team. Now it does.
30 sharp prompts across 8 disciplines, plus Claude Skills, agent blueprints and playbooks. Four prompts are free, no email needed. Everything else is one $149 price: pay once, own it, 30-day refund if it disappoints. The blog half of the site runs itself: an engine I built picks a topic, drafts it in house style, checks it and publishes it twice a week.
30 prompts, 8 disciplines · 46 articles live · 10 published by my engine
Engineered with
Claude + Claude Code, Claude Skills, Python, FastAPI, Fly.io, Stripe, Resend, Cloudflare Workers, GitHub Actions, Make.com, Beehiiv
What I had to work out
- An SEO content engine that picks, drafts, de-duplicates and publishes posts on a schedule, with no hands on it
- Stripe checkout, webhook and magic-link login on a small API, wired so the live price never undercuts checkout
- A LinkedIn auto-poster on a Worker cron: random times, 24h minimum gap, max 4 a week
- Free lead tools with no email gate: Slop Sniffer scores copy 0 to 100, Prompt Audit scores a prompt 0 to 6
- A pre-deploy check that catches hand-typed counts drifting from the real library
A5MorningStackthe morning brief$45, once
One morning brief. Every brand you run.
I run marketing across 8 brands, so I built myself a dashboard for it. Then I rebuilt it properly, for anyone with the same problem. MorningStack is the morning paper for your own work: every brand, every number, today’s first move, on one page. Not a SaaS, a small kit of Python and HTML that runs on your own machine. Pay once, yours forever.
7 platforms mapped · 0 accounts needed · $0 a month to run
Engineered with
Python, Claude API + CLI, FastAPI, Fly.io, Stripe, Resend, SQLite, RSS, Cloudflare Workers
What I had to work out
- Payment to delivery with no accounts: Stripe webhook, signed download token, email, lost-link recovery
- A Claude-ranked list of the day’s quick wins, with a rules-based fallback that works without AI
- Day-over-day change tracking from local snapshots, so nothing about your brands touches my servers
- Product tagging so one Stripe account can run several products without crossed wires
- An EU digital-goods compliant checkout with matching terms and refund pages
A6Pixeldexgame-dev, free5 engines
Guides, pixel art builders, prompts, the works. Free, properly free.
The full kit for making little games with Claude and Claude Code. Step-by-step walkthroughs, prompt pages for five engines, starter projects you can download and run, and browser tools for sprites, levels and sound. No upsell at the end, no paywall in the middle.
5 game engines · 9 starter kits · 54 pages with schema
Engineered with
Claude Code, HTML + CSS, Python, Structured data, llms.txt, Cloudflare Workers, GitHub Actions
What I had to work out
- A spec-driven page generator that writes the page, its HowTo and FAQ schema, and updates the index, sitemap and llms.txt in one go
- SEO for search engines and AI answer engines at the same time
- Working starter projects for Godot, Unity, Pico-8, LOVE2D and Phaser, zipped and ready
- A keyword rank tracker that lives inside a free tier
A7DraftFolka writing room0 accounts
Free writing software. No strings, no AI, big features.
A distraction-free writing room for your book. Your words stay in your browser: no account, no login. Install it from the browser and it works offline. Set a word goal, run a writing challenge, write. The only thing that ever leaves your machine is an anonymous word count, never the words.
0 accounts needed · 3 writing challenges · 0 words of yours collected
Engineered with
Next.js, Service workers + PWA, localStorage, Python, Playwright, FastAPI, Fly.io, Cloudflare Workers
What I had to work out
- Kept a built Next.js site evolving with no source code, patching the HTML and the React payload in lockstep
- A headless-browser check that catches hydration mismatches React normally hides
- Offline install with a versioned service worker cache
- Privacy-safe writing stats: hashed daily ids and word counts only
A8Swallowtaila thought-catcher0 servers
Catch a thought. The swallow keeps it safe.
A quiet little place to save the things worth holding onto: a thought, a quote, a link you do not want to lose. Nothing leaves your machine. Leave it idle and the swallow brings an old thought back to you. Related notes find each other with no AI and no server at all.
0 dependencies · 0 bytes sent to a server · v2 rebuilt, v1 kept
Engineered with
Vanilla JS, HTML + CSS, localStorage, Cloudflare Workers, GitHub Actions
What I had to work out
- Related-note linking with plain maths: keyword themes plus a similarity score, no AI
- An idle resurfacing feature with an animated mascot that respects reduced-motion settings
- A full v2 rebuild with the original preserved
A9The Dittywith me dad20 posts
Album reviews, hi-fi and headphones. Honest scores out of 10, kit we actually own.
The music magazine I always wanted, made with me dad. He writes vinyl and hi-fi, I write reviews, gear and playlists, and we argue about the scores. I built the whole platform it runs on: an editor dashboard with a separate dash for each writer, posts that pull straight in from our socials, a live strip of what’s on my headphones, a submissions inbox, and a connection so Claude can draft into it while every word that goes out is ours.
20 posts live · 2 writer dashboards · /10 every score explained
Engineered with
Custom CMS, Spotify API, Instagram import, MCP, Editorial, Music criticism, SEO
What I had to work out
- The publishing platform itself: posts, reviews with scores, gear boxes, playlists
- An editor dashboard with a separate dash for each writer
- Social posts pulled straight into the main feed, images rehosted on the site
- A live ‘On Zara’s headphones’ strip fed from Spotify
- A submissions inbox, and an MCP connection so drafts arrive in house style and nothing publishes without us
Side B
The day job, and the ones before it. Full history on LinkedIn.
B1Music24Remote2023-now
Marketing across 8 brands: music apps with millions of users, a B2B analytics platform, an enterprise API, and more. 37 social accounts, 8 branded blogs, and a weekly newsletter I still write by hand.
AI agents handle the repetition; I handle discernment, direction and the decision. Content strategy, SEO, AI-search visibility and the editorial call on what is actually worth publishing. Lead writer on the weekly music newsletter.
Highlights
8 brands · 37 social accounts · 8 branded blogs · AI agents
B2Freelance content and copywriterRemote2009-now
Content, copywriting, newsletters, whitepapers, ghostwriting and full rebrands for clients across tech, fintech, iGaming, SaaS, crypto, healthcare and eCommerce, including Dove, E45, iwoca and Iceland (the supermarket, not the country). HuffPost bylines along the way.
Agency work with FATJOE, Stickyeyes and Profit Engine, focused on SEO-first content for iGaming, fintech and SaaS. Humans first, always, but I have known how to make Google happy for over a decade, and now the LLMs too.
Highlights
Brand voice · Rebrands · SEO · Ghostwriting
B3Editorial board, Tenants UpdateWolverhampton Homes2014-2018
Part of the editorial team taking a 27,000-reader tenants’ magazine from print to digital. Local government changes, resident features and community impact stories, published quarterly.
Highlights
27k readers · Print to digital
B4Community and content, Shakti WomenWest Midlands2016-2018
Social strategy, newsletter copy and campaign comms for a business supporting women through mentoring and events. Curated and produced a poetry anthology end to end, from sourcing poets to running the launch night.
Highlights
Community · Events · Publishing
B5Earlierbefore
Arts centre board member, YMCA fundraising, and a few years volunteering on sustainability projects. Happy to talk through any of it.
Credits
Everything on this sleeve was written, marketed and made by me. The tools changed from track to track; the habit didn’t. I start with who it’s for, ship the smallest useful version, then put real numbers on it.
If you’re hiring for one of these skills, the Play only switch on Side A shows you where to look.
Music isn’t a hobby. It’s how I think.
Are you available?
Is any of it AI-free?
Why liner notes?
Bookings and enquiries · NL · UK · remote · happy to relocate
zara@zarawalker.co.uk
I read every email myself, usually within a day or two.
Elsewhere: LinkedIn · The Ditty · the drum machine
℗ & © 2026 Zara Walker. Pressed in the Netherlands. Play loud.