Dan's Daily

In my career thus far it’s been really clear when I’ve worked with someone who cares.

Whether they care about the product, the results, their craft, or their team members, there are many flavours of carrying, but there is an undeniable energy about these people. It’s impressive, admirable, and infectious.

They’ll move mountains because they want to.

Maru and I are getting a bunch of vaccinations in preparation for our upcoming honeymoon. We’re going to a few remote and rural places which mean vaccinations against diseases like Rabies and Japanese Encephalitis are important.

I thanked past-Dan this week when I pulled out my little yellow vaccination book. I’ve got almost my entire vaccination history in there from when I was a young boy.

Although I haven’t had many vaccines in recent years, it was a breeze to show the vaccination clinic my past records and for them to immediately recommend what vaccines to get before my trip.

A little bit of organisation and preparedness can save money and headaches down the line.

The pain of a missed warm up may not be felt during the game, the run, or the workout. But it’s often felt afterwards.

I was running late to a tennis match today, and I raced on to the court and began playing with a token warm up. Barely a few lunges and leg swings. To make matters worse, I haven’t played in a many weeks.

I’m sure the tightness and aches in my back I’ve been feeling the rest of the day are directly tied to this (poor) decision.

This isn’t a lesson I want to learn a second time.

Firstly, apologies if you’ve replied to my blog in recent times and haven’t received a reply. I’ve had a few issues in migrating from Google Workspace to an another solution, and thankfully my friend Harry pointed out last week that my email address was bouncing replies. It took a number of days to debug, and should be working again.

Secondly, I’ve also been a disappointed that I’ve fallen behind on replies over the last few months; I was much better at this in the past. When a reader takes the time to send a thought or opinion, I appreciate it and intend to reply promptly. I’ll endeavour to improve on that.

Entropy is the natural decline of things into disorder.

Our bodies age. Software gets bugs. Things in our home break. Relationships can fray.

Without intervention, this stuff is unavoidable.

However, the moment we get comfortable with this as a law of nature, the better we’re able to respond to entropy’s challenges.

We can age gracefully whilst maintaining cardiovascular fitness and strength. We can add automated tests and alerts to our software. We can send our appliances off for repair. And we can invest in building stronger bonds with family and friends.

When the topic is too complicated to unpick in my mind, I write.

When the trade-offs are hard and painful, I write.

When there’s an important message to deliver, I write.

As more and more people lean on AI for their writing, I still find putting my own words on paper to be a major help in clarifying my own thinking.

When we moved into our new flat last year, Maru made a great suggestion: ensure everything has a home.

When things don’t have a home, we are more likely to accept clutter and mess. However, when everything has a home, there’s no reason why something should be left out of place.

Overall this leads to the home feeling a lot more organised. And when there is a mess, it’s much more manageable.

I’ve been playing around with Replit agent recently. Replit is a web-based integrated programming environment, and its agent is an AI tool that creates apps for you based on natural language prompts.

I wanted to use Replit agent to experiment with building a simple app. I gave myself 30 minutes to see what it could do.

I decided to build an app that takes the 1,000 most common Spanish words and puts them into flashcard format to vocabulary revision. The flow is: when you see a Spanish word, you guess the English translation, click on the card to reveal the English word, and mark your answer as either correct or incorrect. There is progress bar on the right-hand side that measures your results throughout the session.

I was able to build a prototype within the 30 minutes. I used a simple table of the 1,000 most common Spanish words from this website as my source data. And I wrote a prompt asking Replit agent to create a database with the 1,000 words and a simple user interface to serve my flashcards and progress bar. After a series of back and forth prompts and debugging, I arrived at this prototype.

It cost me $3.5 USD to build the prototype. Wild.

There’s an amazing fish called Sicyopterus stimpsoni, or the “Rockclimbing Goby”. It’s a Hawaiian small fish—about 1 inch in size—that uses its mouth as a suction cup to scale waterfalls of up to 30 meters.

The goby attempts this arduous climb to lay eggs at the top of the waterfall—it’s a place well protected from predators. However, only 1% of goby’s make it to the top, the rest perish in the climb. After the successful ones lay their eggs, and those eggs hatch, their offspring are carried out to see via the waterfall and river, and those fish repeat the journey 6 months later.

It’s one of the most stunning and stark examples of natural selection at work. Nature sometimes doesn’t feel fair, but it’s certainly amazing.

We embarked on an epic road trip today. A group of seven of us who attended this weekend’s wedding woke up early, travelled five hours from Jaipur to Agra to see the Taj Mahal, and then drove another four and a half hours to Delhi airport before our flights home.

The Taj Mahal is spectacular; hands down one of the most impressive structures I’ve seen in my life.

The mausoleum was built by Emperor Shah Jahan for his wife, and the perfectly symmetrical structure took more than 20 years to build. Right down to the red, green, and black rocks set into the marble, every detail was thought through with such care and precision.

I was beyond impressed and am so glad we chose to do the lengthy and roadtrip to make seeing it possible.

Maru and I are in Jaipur, India for the weekend. We’re attending the wedding of one of Maru’s university friends and we’re always blown away by the magic of Indian weddings. The multiple days of celebration, the colours, the dancing, the food; it’s a beautiful showcase of India’s rich and wonderful culture.

Over the two days, the parties go on until the early hours of the morning. Conveniently I’m staying in London time for the five days we’re here.

Although I’m sure we’ll be very tired when we arrive back in London, we’ll look back on a truly special weekend with close friends.

Many songs from The Beatles catalog were written in an afternoon. I Want To Hold your Hand, Paperback Writer, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, to name a few.

Because a lot of art is digital nowadays, it gives us an infinite canvas where there’s a temptation to tinker ad nauseum.

However, the constraints and simplicity of older recording methods also resulted in faster creative decision making. There’s something magical about seeing or listening to art made in an afternoon.

There have been projects where I’ve had endless energy to work on them.

I find it easy to get into a state of flow, and even the setbacks feel like small speed bumps.

When considering a new project or opportunity, I think about how much energy it will require of me, and if I’m lucky, the answer may sometimes be: endless energy.

What if credit cards were called mini-loan cards? Or short-term debt cards?

I’m sure they’d sell fewer cards, but maybe it’d help people better understand what they’re really signing up to.

Note: Of course, there are benefits, such as transaction protection, but I think it would pay to have more people aware of the downsides.

Every so often I pick up a copy of the Economist when I’ve got some extra time. When I do, I’m reminded why I love the their style of writing.

They take big, complex topics and make them simple and easy to understand. That’s hard work.

They have a consistent structure, tone, and point of view that helps me quickly orient myself on a topic. It’s a high amount of signal with very little noise.

I may have shared this before, but it’s summed up well in their mission statement: to take part in a severe contest between intelligence and ignorance obstructing our progress.