Eugene
OK, so the weekly post about Eugene's antics fell apart quickly (totally didn't see that coming). I haven't posted since the week of 1/20/25, so this is a "catch up for February" edition. 😬 Perhaps hard to believe, but February was
Eugene
January has officially arrived in Chicago, which means it's insanely cold and everyone is grumpy. Luckily for us this changes nothing about Eugene's vibe and he's helping us get through it by staying sleepy and even keel. The aforementioned cold does require us to
Eugene
It was a low key week – well, more than normal at least – since everyone was getting back into their normal work/school routines and there wasn’t as much time to just stare and admire Eugene all day. The pace should pick up once we get back into a normal
Eugene
Today marks the first edition of a semi-regular post featuring Eugene's antics for the last week or so in photo format. Hope you enjoy it. He got into the holiday spirit. He played with his cousin Ivo and battled over corn (we've all been there). After
Writing
For 10+ years I've been hand rolling my own blog and it's been...fine. My site was never going to win any design awards, but it was always fast, readable, and accessible. I used Jekyll + Github Pages for a while and more recently Hugo + Cloudflare to
tl;dr: It works like email, and your posts will have a much wider audience over time. Audience / Purpose This is a simplified primer for normals to hopefully convince y’all to use federation from Threads, so I’m going to be generalizing and glazing over details. Nerds, don’t
Talks
So you’re thinking about becoming an engineering manager, eh? Awesome, let’s go! I considered this exact same decision about a year ago, and ultimately ended up taking the leap. I’ll walk you through how I made the call to switch to being an EM after many years
For 10+ years I've been hand rolling my own blog and it's been...fine. My site was never going to win any design awards, but it was always fast, readable, and accessible. I used Jekyll + Github Pages for a while and more recently Hugo + Cloudflare to
I know this feeling isn’t unique. In fact you might be feeling today how I did years ago — coming home from work tired, uninspired, unhappy, and even angry. It’s not a good look. But change is within your grasp. It won’t be easy, but you can be
Think back to the the last time you struggled mightily with a programming problem. Did you share it with the world? If you didn’t, that’s totally OK — most of us don’t! Why would we? Nobody enjoys admitting defeat, much less wanting to make a big deal out
👋 Hi, I’m Dan! I’m a software engineer and a dad. I write about tech, work, and life, but spend most of my time thinking about dogs.
If you’re anything like me, you prefer to have complete control over your photo library files. But backing up those files on a rolling, ongoing basis has long been a pretty disjointed and painful process. How do you get photos and videos off your phone on a regular basis,
If you’re writing anything of consequence, the sad reality is that you’re probably going to get shit on. Whether it’s a short blog post or a 10,000 word essay, someone will find a way to object to your ideas or question your motives in a not-so-friendly
Building mobile apps is what we love to do, but there’s always one nagging problem — writing server side components to support our apps can be surprisingly complex and difficult. There’s a lot of overhead and a bunch of unfamiliar languages, frameworks, and styles of programming that we’re
Many of today’s work environments are crazy — they run at a frenetic pace, full of interruptions and distractions. They leave us drained, overworked, and frustrated. And yet we do our best work in the opposite environment — when we’re focused, clear headed, and have time to think. So let’
As the saying goes, it’s not the destination, it’s the journey! In this talk I’ll be sharing my personal story as an introduction to what a Kotlin journey might look like. We’ll explore how and why Kotlin can make such a big impact on our work.
Every day each one of us turns to community contributions to help us become better developers — blog posts, open source projects, conference talks, podcasts, and so much more. Can you imagine if these resources didn’t exist?! And while our community is strong today, it’s healthiest when it continues
Jeff Bezos is generally one those people whose ideas and thinking make a lot of sense to me. He’s a billionaire so he’s always going to be an out of touch weirdo, but some of his ideas click with me. So when I recently came across a fantastic
When Kotlin hit the Android scene, one of the first things many of us did was wrap difficult-to-use Android Framework APIs with extension functions. That little sprinkle of Kotlin made all the difference, and life was great — we finally we had a way to make our least favorite calls more
If you’ve been paying attention to what’s been going on in our community — conferences, meetups, blog posts, podcasts, open source (the list goes on and on) — you’ve probably noticed a really wonderful energy and spirit behind them all. Yes, our community is healthy and thriving! And while
I know this feeling isn’t unique. In fact you might be feeling today how I did years ago — coming home from work tired, uninspired, unhappy, and even angry. It’s not a good look. But change is within your grasp. It won’t be easy, but you can be
Why are we still doing this to each other? It’s thankfully been a really long time since I’ve been invited to a recurring meeting. But I heard a couple mentions of them last week, and it brought back terrible pre-Basecamp memories. It reminded me that not everyone is
A lot of teams are super excited by Kotlin and are ready to go all-in with it. But while exciting, it can also be stressful — learning a brand new language while converting old code and writing new features, all at the same time? How does a team get there as