About Dan

I always feel like I’m learning, re-learning, trying to learn, or more importantly, figuring something out; and since people are always asking me how I do what I do… here’s a bit of my backstory.

DigDug!

I started playing with code in the late 70s / early 80s, on a Commodore 64 that my dad bought. He used to get tons of different science magazines, and in particular, Popular Science (I think that was the one) used to send out snippets of binary code in their magazines. Being somewhat unruly, I managed to get grounded for a couple of weeks. So, my friend and I discovered these snips; one such snip was DigDug. I spent so many quarters on that dang game, so when I saw it, I was like "Whoa! Check this out! If we type these pages of 1s and 0s into the computer, we can play Dig-Dug for FREE!!

So, we went down to my room, and started typing... line after line... column after column... page after... Wait! Where's the rest of it!? In another issue of the magazine. Ugh!... We dug out another issue, and another, and this went on for a month or so, until we finally received the last magazine with the last snipped of binary. We saved the .bin file on our lovely 5 1/4" floppy (double-density, thanks to my Mom's hole-punch), and typed in the magical run command. The command prompt disappeared, and the colorful arcade-ish DigDug screen appeared. We celebrated for a second, and then started playing.

Unfortunately, we'd missed a 1 or a 0 (or several) somewhere, because the hose would blotch out from time to time, and the exploding creatures were more like a pixelated blocks than the KA-BOOM that we expected. But, the game worked! We played that thing for hours...

Since that day, I've always been amazed by code, how it can translate those words or dwords into actions, and how those actions can improve our lives.

From there, I moved on to batch files, video-games on my Dad’s Amiga (shout out to The Bard's Tale), and hours of figuring out Windows 1.1, etc… etc… down in the basement, in the last house on the left.

Needless to say, I grew up on Windows, and never really had much exposure to Linus’ invention - Linux.

I joined the military straight out of highschool, traveled the world, and lived the next 8-ish years outside the continental US.

I remember discovering The Internet for the first time while I was living in Southern Spain. Back then, people weren’t thinking about security or how you could just simply browse into the computers of your neighbors - everything was wide-open, for better or worse. This re-kindled my interest, and knowing that I had no intention of spending another fifteen years in the military, I enrolled in college, and started taking computer courses. C++ 3.0 programming, databases, etc…

Fast-Forward to Today

I’m always learning - Linux, Ansible, Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, Javascript, Markdown, Python, SQL, Splunk, AppDynamics (ADQL), Prometheus…; and the list goes on and on…
I’m not the king of any, but I am tenacious, and I rarely give up.

So, try not to judge the (more than likely) simple or already known answers that I post to issues, and the amount of simplicity, or perhaps complexity, of my setup.
If you know of a better way, then Please drop me a line and let me know!