Hi, I’m dan [dsp-0029]

I’m a curious exister living in Portland, OR. I’m also a dad and a husband who currently programs computers for a living. My interests over the years have spanned from type theory to cryptography and from distributed consensus to embedded systems.

I’ve tried probably a dozen platforms, approaches, and styles for places for me to exorcize my thoughts, to emanate my vibe, but nothing has ever felt quite right. The purpose of this site is for me to do just that, but to do it untethered from a need to defend or justify any of the connections I find in my head. Think of it as a map—a place to trace any and all of my lines of flight.

If I’ve learned anything through everything I’ve tried, it’s that I’m not really a writer, I’m actually just a blogger. I’ve tried to categorize everything I’ve written by finding the right outlet for each little fracture of myself I’m shining light on with any given piece of writing, trying desperately to keep one identity from reflecting another. But it turns out what I really need to do to be a whole person is to put all the fractures together into a singular mirror, so that’s what you’ll find here. I collected all the writing I’ve done on the Internet over the last 10 years or so (going back to 2014) and dropped them here, incongruences, fleeting interests, and all.

Should you want to contact me you can shoot an email to dan at this domain. I have given a few talks through the years, and you can see my CV here.

About This Site [dsp-0031]

This site uses the static site generator Hakyll and Edward Tufte’s Sidenote CSS by way of Pandoc Sidenote. You can find the source for it here.

It is a forest. Related items are linked to one another rather than adhering to a chronological order; I think that’s the best way to find your way around. You can literally follow my trains of thought.

Here’s a few notes on post metadata that may be useful:

Working with the Garage Door Open [dsp-0H0E]

When I converted this blog from the conventional reverse-chronological ordering to something you had to follow links to get around in, like it was a dark forest and you were wandering from tree to tree, it was heavily influenced by the many people who’d done it before. Even “working with the garage door open” is borrowed. I found myself thinking again about that garage door this morning, after a month or so of heavy notes-to-myself taking as I learned the ins and outs of a number of new things at work, and it occurred to me that I ought to act on that sentiment if it resonated with me so much. So today I added a new key/value pair to post metadata called garage, where I’ll denote the status of a page according to its completeness &c. I say &c. because I think the in/out of the garage concept has more to do with than just completeness or polish; I think in a lot of ways, it comes down to intention. Something that I intended to be for public consumption from the beginning, an essay or blog post I set to write intentionally, may still be a WIP, it may be completed, or something in between, but notes that I wrote while I learned something that I never really intended to consider as a “piece of writing” doesn’t really fit in that spectrum. Anyway, here are the states I’ll be using for the garage key and what they mean:

• open: you’re just seeing me work something out in the open, these are notes mostly for me, it is not something that I edited or thought about word choice or cadence or anything like that. It may not “make sense” in a narrative or continuity way, but you may find some useful nuggets of information.

• closed: The garage door is closed and I’m not home, I’m out pitching this piece. Something with “garage: closed” was always intended to be for public consumption, and is—modulo the handful of typos I’m sure you’ll find—done. A piece labeled closed is more like a conventional blog post.

• light on: A piece with public-facing intentions but is still a work in progress. These I don’t think you’ll find much of, but if you do it’s likely because I published to get input on, and you’re seeing the progress through the frosted glass of the garage door.

• light off: A piece with public-facing intentions that was abandoned or left unfinished.

Below I’ve linked a few favorites to get you started, or you may want to start with the list of tags or subscribe to the feed.