The Curious Engineer

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Dan Dreams of Coding

dandreamsofcoding.com

Thoughts, stories and ideas.

Engineering management / careersSoftware / engineering practicePerformance / optimization

’15’20’25
Posts
209 from 9 Nov 2012 to 28 Oct 2026
Posting
monthly (17 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://www.dandreamsofcoding.com/rss/

2026 17

  1. Time to Move On
  2. Switching to Ghost
  3. What Happens Next
  4. No Buts
  5. Advanced Technical Topics: Orchestration
  6. Advanced Technical Topics: Idempotence
  7. Category Error
  8. Lead Pipes
  9. The Wave of the Future
  10. Negotiating Vendor Contracts
  11. The Reckoning
  12. Thinking (and Hiring) in Bets
  13. Trust me, I know nothing
  14. The Big Mac Coding Era
  15. Understanding Performance
  16. Lucky
  17. How to improve team velocity, and why you won't

2025 2

  1. Ever Again
  2. Simple nginx configuration

2024 1

  1. ECS Starter Stack

2018 2

  1. Setting expectations
  2. Joining M.Gemi

2017 5

  1. Specialization: Part 1
  2. I told you so
  3. On exceeding capacity
  4. Management competencies
  5. Climbing Back on the Wagon

2016 21

  1. Boomerang
  2. How to make an introduction
  3. Negotiating for time
  4. Starter AWS stack
  5. Can't you make the team work harder?
  6. Hiring Engineers
  7. The PERN stack
  8. Managing rapid growth
  9. On not knowing
  10. Special Skills
  11. Ownership
  12. Closing shop
  13. AWS: a case study
  14. Full-stack Javascript
  15. Analytics First
  16. Startup year one: Building a great team
  17. The Tyranny of the P1
  18. Linux commands: partitioning, formatting, and mounting a drive
  19. Linux commands: cut and tr
  20. Linux commands: find
  21. Then and now

2015 22

  1. Doing the dishes
  2. How to set up the Android Emulator on a Mac
  3. Balancing your party
  4. Cleverness kills
  5. The parable of the 56k modem
  6. Three simple cooking hacks
  7. The Technologist's Dilemma
  8. Startup log: first impressions
  9. Monetizing failure: March/April 2015 report
  10. That's why they call it work
  11. Startup operations priorities
  12. Someone just quit
  13. Reflections on a year in DevOps
  14. Goldilocks process
  15. Customs
  16. Monetizing failure: February 2015 report
  17. is-a vs. has-a
  18. Monetizing failure: January 2015 report
  19. Three numbers
  20. Taking the long view
  21. Dissecting an interview question: math is hard
  22. Java quirks and interview gotchas

2014 31

  1. Things I hate, things I like
  2. Why big companies slow down, and what to do about it
  3. Special Roles: a Bestiary
  4. Three Nations
  5. Positive Feedback
  6. The Rules
  7. What annoys us defines us
  8. Running from bullets
  9. Knowing and Learning
  10. Dissecting an interview question: reconstructing a tree
  11. Making the end of your internship count
  12. What not to do during an interview
  13. Beads on a string
  14. Science, superstition, and open plan offices
  15. Shame is good
  16. Personal Favorites
  17. Your experience is not representative
  18. Infrastructure improvements
  19. Responsibility: a lament
  20. What makes a good interview question
  21. Dissecting an interview question
  22. Operations curriculum
  23. On to my next adventure
  24. What to do if you don't get a summer internship
  25. Monetizing failure: February report
  26. Accident Prone
  27. Why I wear a watch
  28. Monetizing failure: January report
  29. LoJack solutions
  30. Getting the most out of your internship
  31. Favorite Mistakes

2013 56

  1. Monetizing personal failure
  2. Special
  3. Do This
  4. Top Down and Bottom Up
  5. Discipline
  6. Speaking your Mind
  7. Looking back on a year of blogging
  8. Starting Well (or, lessons learned from watching Brubaker)
  9. Pumpkin Nut Bread
  10. The Curse of the Golden Child
  11. Mise en place
  12. Changing your mind, selling out
  13. Silver Bullets
  14. Epigrams
  15. Hackers and Software Engineers
  16. Things that have outlasted any reasonable expectation
  17. Hiring - Fast and Slow
  18. Screwing up
  19. Politics, self-censorship, and awesome sauce
  20. Welcome to the team!
  21. Customer Service
  22. Why to Write
  23. The Adults in the Room
  24. Reading Group: The Power of a Positive No
  25. Culture Shock: iPhone to Android and Back Again
  26. Cheating on His Other Love
  27. Fun vs Satisfaction
  28. Goal Focus
  29. Books on Tape
  30. You Don't Know a Goddamn Thing
  31. Reading Group: Crucial Conversations
  32. Letter to a new technical manager
  33. Mastery
  34. Intermediate Mastery
  35. Disaster Movies
  36. Broke gets fixed, crappy is forever
  37. Mind Control
  38. Mastering the Basics
  39. When Theater is Security
  40. Lessons from Home: an Interlude
  41. Anti-Mastery
  42. How "Senior" Software Engineers are Different
  43. How to Write a Great Blog Post
  44. How I know I'm still a nerd
  45. Opportunityspotting
  46. Career Management
  47. Questions I Want to Ask, but Can't
  48. Staying Technical
  49. The Cardinal Sin
  50. Kihon, Kata, and Kumite
  51. Managing managers
  52. How to Fail
  53. Status Reports
  54. What Do Technical Managers Do, Anyway?
  55. Message in a Bottle
  56. Hard Problems

2012 9

  1. Learn on someone else's dime
  2. An elegant data type for a more civilized age
  3. Building a better developer
  4. How to be a star
  5. How to prepare for technical interviews
  6. Why won't anyone talk to me? What recruiters look for in a resume
  7. Screwing up the technical interview - common mistakes
  8. Various Approaches to a Simple Interview Problem
  9. Hello, world

Undated 43

  1. Filling the interstices
  2. Monetizing failure march report
  3. My first big idea
  4. Monetizing failure april report
  5. Monetizing failure may report
  6. Learning from rage
  7. Monetizing failure june report
  8. Sticking
  9. Monetizing failure july report
  10. Management lessons from summer vacation
  11. Monetizing failure august report
  12. Monetizing failure september report
  13. Feedback
  14. Monetizing failure october report 2
  15. Monetizing failure november report
  16. Faux diy
  17. Monetizing failure 2014 report
  18. Hiring technical managers is hard
  19. Mechanists and humanists across the hiring divide
  20. Interviewing is hard 2
  21. Node express reactjs aws a case study in architecture
  22. Build vs buy
  23. To infinity and beyond
  24. The swamp
  25. Sacred cows and overdue library books
  26. Shutting down a dream
  27. The restaurant reviewer
  28. Working code
  29. Building a dumber team
  30. Tools and agents
  31. The two ai consensuses
  32. Vibe metrics
  33. On being in between and ambiguity
  34. Decisions and will power
  35. Lost skills
  36. A taxonomy of trust
  37. Coding as jazz piano
  38. How to piss off demoralize and demotivate your team
  39. How to build a college recruiting pipeline
  40. Communal responsibility anti pattern
  41. Old school coding tricks
  42. Management style
  43. Seven stages of learning