Well, it’s time to check in on my exercise and diet goals. I’ve never had New Year’s resolutions that lasted more than a week, and I didn’t particularly expect these to, either. So I didn’t really have any long term goals beyond “lose weight” or “get back into shape”. Well, it’s taken seven months, but I’ve […]
Author Archives: Dan
It’s hard to believe it’s already past the middle of July, that summer’s half gone, and that you’re two-thirds of the way through your internship. You might not realize it, but the next couple of weeks are a critical period during which much of the career value of the internship can be gained or lost. […]
It’s easy enough to step on a landmine (or swallow a grenade) when interviewing for your dream job. But what about the interviewer? How can you screw up an interview with your dream candidate? Don’t ask forbidden questions It’s amazing how many people are asked to interview without being given even the most basic instructions […]
There’s something simultaneously inspiring and incredibly disheartening about following the tweets of a professional writer like @nkjemison. Here’s a well-respected author with a half dozen books in print, and you’d like to believe that she just sits down whenever she likes, bangs out a couple of perfect pages, then goes off to whatever larger-than-life stuff authors do […]
So you start your own company, you’re living the dream, struggling, eating canned soup and praying desperately for your big break. And it comes! Things work out, and your company thrives. Or perhaps you join somewhere along the way, learn the tech stack and culture, get enmeshed, make a contribution. But things that worked well […]
Well, it’s that time again – time to check in and see how monetizing failure in my diet and exercise regime has been working. June saw my five-and-a-half month streak of workouts come to an end, though for a good reason – we finally moved! Being within a half mile of work means getting two hours of my life back, every […]
Whenever you find yourself doing one of the following things during an interview, just don’t. OK? Don’t suck at something you say you’re an expert at Seriously, how often do I talk to Java experts who don’t know how to use the most basic java.util classes? Or bash experts who don’t know how to grep? Or 3D math […]
In traditional western musical composition, each score typically has a time signature that defines the overall tempo of the music. One number defines the length of the beat, the other the number of beats per measure. So, you might have three quarter notes ( 3 4 ), two half notes ( 2 2 ), seven eighth notes ( 7 8 […]
If you’re anything like me, you probably have one or more anti-science, anti-rationalist bêtes noires. Maybe you like to rage against the creationists and what they’re doing to our schools. Or gripe about the global warming deniers and what they’re doing to our planet. Or fume about the crazy anti-vaccination nuts and what they’re doing to […]
Pattern In the phenomenally successful 7 Habits of Highly Successful People, Steven Covey describes the time management matrix, in which work is classified as important / not-important, and urgent / not-urgent. This gives us the following set of four quadrants: In a nutshell, the point is that effective people spend their time in quadrants 1 and 2 – it can […]
Dan Dreams of Coding 