Dan's Blog

_Author's note: I wrote this in March 2023, but just published in October 2025.

Fairly recently (in iOS 17), Apple introduced a pretty nifty way to handle theme changes in iOS apps.

This morning, [Bryce Roberts](https://x.com/bryce) shared [this short clip](https://x.com/bryce/status/1876770331450298476) of a conversation between him and [Soleio](https://x.com/soleio), one of the first designers at Facebook (now Meta).

I've got quite the yak shave to share (have you [shaved a yak](https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/388092/what-exactly-is-yak-shaving) before?

This is a list of my 7 favorite things about the book [Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration](http://amzn.to/2jNhPDS), by Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar Animation. 1.

This race was a breakthrough for me.

Woke up at 5:10, a little earlier than I’d planned since my dad-in-law decided he was doing the race at the last minute, so I picked him up on the way.

After some frustrations in tracking my open water swims and races with the [fēnix 5](http://amzn.to/2u1aq60), I decided to do something a little wild.

#### Pre-race Pros: * Had dinner (chicken + sweet potato) night before before 6pm * Breakfast (oats, banana, maple syrup) was great once again * Warmed up for about 10 minutes about an hour pre-swim, stretched, dynamic WU, and then a run (tried to get up…

My iMac has started resetting my mouse's tracking speed upon every restart.

Marco Arment released an [iOS 9 Content Blocker](http://peace.land) on Wednesday and it quickly rocketed up to #1 on the Paid App Store charts.

We're vacationing in Whistler, BC right now as "endurance spectators" to my father-in-law's 3rd Ironman triathlon.

It's now been a few hours after The WWDC 2015 Keynote, and I've had some time to digest everything.

Here's my list of things I'd be overjoyed to see fixed / announced / released at WWDC 2015 next week. ### iOS * Deep linking support.

My wife and I have been searching for months for a service to allow us to store our sensitive files in Dropbox securely.

I've been using and working with Python in a professional context for around 8 years.

After hearing a few months back that PostgreSQL had built-in full-text search support, I had been continually searching for reasons to take advantage of it.

I normally don’t write reviews, but I figured it’s never a bad time to start.

It's been almost four years since my wife and I made the decision to move to Los Angeles after college.

A couple weeks back, Google released ngx_pagespeed, an nginx module that is capable of doing a lot of cool stuff behind the scenes to speed up your webpages. > ngx_pagespeed speeds up your site and reduces page load time.

Mike Krieger (Instagram cofounder) wrote an article today on [Opbeat](http://blog.opbeat.com/2013/04/26/picking-tech-for-your-startup/) regarding the technology stack tech entrepreneurs should use for their startups.

TDD is the only way to write bug-free code.

Like many other developers, the people who I interact with most often in my codebases and issue trackers are not other software engineers—they’re my clients.

I'm a big fan of [Compass](http://compass-style.org/), the CSS framework that uses [Sass](http://sass-lang.com/) under the hood to make developing stylesheets not nearly as tedious as it might be otherwise.

I've been lamenting the state of static files in Django for a while now.

I got back from Belize last Sunday, and I thought it might be a good idea to write a post about it.

You can click on any of these to add them to your Tweetbot. @.+.*@.+.*@.+ This mutes tweets that @ reference three or more users.

I just gave my blog a bit of a refresh--it's been needing it for a while.

I’ve been sitting on this for a couple of weeks now, but I now have a theory as to why Apple increased the iPhone’s screen size from 3.5 inches to 4.

I've been taking a break from writing on this blog for way too long of a time now.

Earlier today, Paul Irish wrote a post on his blog that explains how to deal with an all-too-common issue that all frontend developers face--the div that increases in width and height as soon as you apply padding to it.

I am participating in an Internet-wide blackout in protest of two dangerous bills, the [Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)](http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.uscongress/legislation.112hr3261) and the [Protect IP Act (PIPA)](http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.uscongress/legislation.1…

My [last post](/breakup-notifier) told the story of how I made [Breakup Notifier](http://www.breakupnotifier.com/) and how it exploded in popularity across the Internet.

## Introduction This is the story of Breakup Notifier: when I made it, what the inspiration was, how I handled it, and anything else that might be relevant.

Over the past couple of years, I've been slowly honing a way to manage the deluge of online content that presents itself to me.

I'm a huge fan of the Pareto Principle.

First, a brief re-introduction.

As much as I like my [Vim](http://www.vim.org), there are times when I want it to be just a little cooler.

A few months back I did some research into ticket prices from and to four major cities in the U.S.: Miami, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York.

!

## Intro Airplane rides are always a good time for reflection—there aren’t really any distractions (unless you’re unlucky enough to be sitting next to a crying baby) and the white noise of the engines provides for a nearly perfect brainstorming environmen…

This morning at the gym I started thinking about how nice it would be to be a Photoshop guru.

[The iPad](http://www.apple.com/ipad/) was announced about a week and a half ago to great fanfare amongst both the tech community and the world at large.

First, this post is 100% programming related.

This weekend I've been mulling over how annoying it was that there isn't really freely available data on prices for airline tickets.

Four days has gone by and I haven't visited [Reddit](http://reddit.com/), [Digg](http://digg.com/), or HN.

I vowed on Monday not to visit either Hacker News or Reddit.com for a week starting from yesterday.

I just spent a few hours working on implementing [Clickpass](http://clickpass.com/) with my new project built on [web.py](http://webpy.org/), so I figured I could save everyone else some time by giving some tips on how to fast forward to the actual develo…

I'm vacationing in Cancun right now, a place where more than a million people a year visit year-round to get away from the daily grind.

In America, it seems that the idea of fruit vendors has in some ways died out–but here in China, it can be below freezing, with the wind hitting to the core of your bones, and the loyal sellers will still be outside selling their signature products.