FAQs

Who are you?

My name is Dan, and I'm from London, UK. I've been building things on the internet for ~10 years.

I've written a lot of shit code, and I've written some pretty good code. I've broken websites, and I've un-broken a lot of them.

I hope that the content on this website helps you avoid some of the many mistakes I've made in my career so far. These are notes from a fellow traveller. I hope you find them useful.

Why should I listen to you?

In all honestly, you probably shouldn't.

In my career so far I've garnered a reputation of being able to build things quickly and reliably, but maybe not always exactly as would be recommended by "the book".

I have, however, been doing this job for a while now, and have worked with lots of developers that are far more capable than me along the way, hopefully they have been able to impart some of their wisdom on me, you'll have to decide for yourself.

Which tech stack do you use to build things?

I like this quote:

"Good design, then, suggests using the least powerful language suitable for a given purpose." — Tim Berners-Lee and Noah Mendelsohn 

I try to use the simplest and most reliable tool for a given job, in the (albeit narrow) band of tools I have a decent knowledge of.

This generally boils down to any combination of:

  • Javascript (in all of its forms, frontend and backend)
  • Sass
  • PostgreSQL
  • Python/Django
  • AWS/GCP

I think the tech behind most software products is over-engineered. You're (probably) not building Google.

I will also argue that the best framework/tool/programming language/library to use for a project is the one you already know.

Long story short, I try to use the right tool for the job, given my existing skill set.

This site, for example, is built using a no-code static site generator. Which I hope goes some way to explaining why it looks so shit.

Where did you get your computer science degree?

I didn't. Apologies.

What do you do when you're not coding?

Mostly, being bad at Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. I spend hours and hours on that.

Your website is rubbish, where else can I go on the internet?

Sorry about that. Here's some people with much better websites, and much more valuable and insightful content than me.

Can I hire you?

Of course, if you like. Unless I already have a contract in place, in which case you can't. Apologies.