It’s been a couple of months since I left TripAdvisor, and as I’ve been coming up for air, I’ve been going through the necessary process of re-evaluating the conventional wisdom I’d come to accept over the past six and a half years. Some of it was great – generally applicable best practices that I’ll use for years to come. […]
Category Archives: Startups
As I mentioned in my last post, my startup has just shipped its first public release! It’s a good feeling to be iterating instead of writing from the ground up, and I thought it would be a good time to take a deep breath and reflect on where we’re at. Architecture Scratch is built using an entirely Javascript […]
I commuted for years. Up and down Route 95, every day, over and over. On a good day it might take me 45 minutes to an hour each way, but one and a half hours was common, and there were a couple of three hour nightmares tucked in over the years. At the same time, […]
As you may know, I recently left TripAdvisor to live the ups and downs of startup life. Now, one of the things that happens when you’re in a place for a long time is that you start to accrete responsibilities. You take ownership of cleaning up a particular error report. Or you set up automated jobs to monitor your […]
It’s hard to believe it’s been six and a half years. In late 2008 my startup had just collapsed, my wife and I were expecting our first child, we’d just bought a house… Oh yeah, and the world economy was shattering into fist-sized pieces of molten pain. Good thing I’d already burned through my savings […]
The swamp is vast, dark, and deep, and passage will cost you dearly. Small bands of travelers with even the most rudimentary instincts for survival will do anything to avoid entry. They recognize it for what it is, redefine their destinations under the shadow of this impenetrable barrier, and either simplify their goals, or turn away toward other ends. Armies […]
One of the things about being in operations is that it introduces you to a whole host of concerns, features, and disciplines that you’d otherwise take completely for granted. In the same way that you rarely think about the work that goes into maintaining the sidewalk outside your house, or the massive international infrastructure devoted […]
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 […]
With recent news of the Democratic failure to get patent reform out of committee, I’ve been thinking about what we, the people, can really do to change the equation. If it were as easy as throwing the bums out on their ears, it wouldn’t be as frustrating – I could simply support, fund, and vote […]
When I was 17 years old, I wrote a little Applesoft BASIC program to help myself memorize vocabulary for my Spanish class. When I went to college, I wrote a new version for the Mac, adding special features for Japanese. Senior year I wrote two new versions – one for my senior project, another for […]
Dan Dreams of Coding 