I was talking with a coworker recently, who described how bad design just pisses him off. He can’t stop his brain from picking an app apart and figuring out what does and doesn’t work. Bad design offends him, as though someone had intentionally decided to seed their lawn with broken glass. The world is a complicated, busy […]
Category Archives: Personal
For those of you new to the blog, this is my monthly report on my attempt to use shame, peer pressure, and financial disincentives to get into shape. August was a strange month. For starters, at the beginning of the month I went on a week-long vacation with family, during which I ate, drank, and generally […]
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 […]
Being in close quarters, away from your own bed, pillow, clothes, shower, pots and pans – everything that gives you a sense of home and comfort – can be an extremely stressful time that exposes everyone to each other’s worst behavior. Kind of like a normal project getting close to release. There’s so much to do […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
Dan Dreams of Coding 