Dan

Engineer Poet with an MBA. Dabbler Extraordinaire.

When I was a technical seller, I used to have a joke that if our product couldn’t do it today – a Cloudflare Solutions Engineer could do it tomorrow. We had an amazing, highly technical team that could deploy some edge side code, python some APIs together, or stand up...

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  • February 22, 2024

Frameworks, systems, tools – You could say I’m a fan. I like using them, building them, breaking them down and re-building them. I like how they open up new ways of looking at data, at making comparisons and creating metaphors, and at either zooming out of a problem or zooming...

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  • August 1, 2021
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I decided to take up mentoring as a way to give back. I realized that when I was just getting out of college and starting out in my career, that there really wasn’t a lot of feedback loops available. Within the school system, you have a pretty regimented system of...

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  • August 20, 2020

(A little inspired by the #builtforthis campaign) The Internet holds a very special place to me. I wouldn’t be who I was without it, and every day I get excited that I get to help connect people to it’s future. One of my earliest encounters with the magic series of tubes was...

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  • April 16, 2020

When I started at Cloudflare, I had high hopes of becoming a “safe pair of hands” – a rugby metaphor used by one of my Georgetown MBA professors. He encouraged us all to become a trustworthy and reliable person to our customers and employers. To be the person that could...

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  • May 18, 2019

“What is your management philosophy?” was the question asked, pretty innocently. I’d been a manager for over a year at this point, and oddly enough, this was the very first time someone was asking me this question. Fortunately for the asker, as well as my team members, I had a...

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  • August 28, 2018
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  Decades ago, when a young programmer poet at the University of Toledo, I had the unique honor of taking a writing course taught by Rane Arroyo. He was a fascinating person, and a great teacher. He pushed for us to evolve cliches to make them unique again, to take a strong position...

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  • March 5, 2018

Is the future a Winner-Take-All world or one open to a Million Mild Successes? It is amazing talking to people getting into the Crypto world and just starting to learn about the technologies. They often speak of speculative comparisons like which coin will win, which blockchain will do better than...

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  • March 5, 2018

Burning Man is humanity’s middle finger to an uncaring universe.   Burning Man takes place in the Nevada dessert. Its extremely hot and bright during the day, and can become bitterly cold and completely dark at night. It is almost completely inhospitable. The term dusty is an understatement as the...

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  • March 5, 2018

I’m a big fan of revisiting old ideas and iterating on them. Its always fascinating using an old concept or framework on a new problem and seeing how well it stands up. Recently, I’ve been noticing the company I’ve been working at, Cloudflare, is slowly re-inventing itself from within and...

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  • March 4, 2018