I sometimes have dreams where someone’s trying to shoot me. They shoot, and I run, and I don’t look back, and – lucky me! – they miss. Such is the logic of dreams. Working in product development can sometimes feel like that. You add a feature with a big new data store, and – poof! – […]
Category Archives: Operations
As I’ve moved into my new operations role, I’ve been continually struck by just how much everyone around me knows. They all seem like polymath geniuses, weaving together a dozen different knowledge domains to come to startlingly insightful diagnoses of intractably obscure problems. Coding a clever algorithm is all very well and good, but that doesn’t get […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 – […]
There’s a big difference between a master mechanic and the guy at Jiffy-Lube who knows how to change your fluids; assembly language, C, C++, Java, and Lisp programmers; command line and GUI users; kernel programmers and Linux users. I’ve been using various flavors of *nix for the better part of 30 years, but as I […]
It seems like forever ago that I took on my first team at TripAdvisor – I was working with two junior engineers (both of whom had more experience with the codebase than I did), some tools and forum code, just muddling my way through. Almost five years later and I’m responsible for six teams, with […]
Dan Dreams of Coding 