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 […]
Author Archives: Dan
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 […]
There’s a power to rage. It’s honest, unselfconscious, and (for the most part) uncontrolled. It has no interest in anyone else’s opinion, has no ulterior motive, and is unguarded. It makes you uncomfortable, and triggers a fight or flight response. You might find it terrifying, inappropriate, sophomoric, ineffective, déclassé, distasteful, or factually incorrect, but you can’t deny its […]
Well, it’s the end of the month, which means it’s time to check in on my experiment in monetizing failure. May was a bit rougher than prior months, with an injury and my first set of failures. The toughest part of the new rules turned out to be the daily sit-ups and push-ups. Not because they were difficult, […]
Shame stops you from merging code you know is crap. It drives you to turn working code into maintainable code, and fix bugs that only you (and your users) know exist. It makes you work harder because you know you haven’t been giving your best effort. It tells you when you’ve screwed up, and pushes you to put […]
In the time since I started writing this blog, a couple of posts have gone viral, many have gotten a reasonable amount of traffic, and others have disappeared without a trace. It is, perhaps, unsurprising that the most popular of my posts have also been the most actionable – how to write an effective resume, how to ace a technical […]
[Trigger warning: though not in detail, this post mentions triggering situations] The Matrix The answer is out there, Neo. It’s looking for you… and it will find you… if you want it to… – Trinity When you go to work, people act professionally toward you. If someone disagrees with you, you hash out your differences and figure out how to […]
Things have continued to go well through April, with the new rule (no work food, other than raw vegetables and fruit) improving my diet significantly. As expected, though, I’ve uncovered a number of ways to be bad without straying into financial consequence territory. For instance, though lunch now consists of a homemade PB&J and the occasional […]
Every day for the last five and a half years I’ve gotten into my car and driven the 40 miles from home to work. And though Boston is known for its bad traffic, the commute has clearly been getting better over time (five years ago, leaving the house after 6:15 AM was an invitation to a two hour commute – […]
I was sitting at my desk, waiting for a meeting to begin. Across the row, one of my colleagues worked away, and since the meeting couldn’t begin without him, I knew that I could safely keep working until he got up to go. I suddenly realized what I was doing. Really? I was just going […]
Dan Dreams of Coding 