Hi! I’m Daniel.
I live in Kansas City where I help run a small Christian church, raise three boys with my awesome wife, and write software for Divvy (acquired by Bill.com).
I run a lot of self-hosted software here at home on some machines that sit on an unnecessarily large server rack in my basement. I love building keyboards, too. I heavily customize my workflow and you can see how I set everything up with Nix if you like (or even my old dotfiles).
Occasionally, I post articles here.
Latest Blog Posts (RSS)
My NixOS/Nix Journey
Posted on Apr 15 2025
I operate computers and I enjoy it. However, I operate a lot of computers, both as an occupation and in my personal life. As I operate computers, I’m often thinking about ways to improve the process of how I operate computers. This fundamental drive in me often pushes me to learn new things, experiment or find different approaches to common problems. I always try to think that perhaps what I have now is a local maximum worth pushing past, especially since, if I play my cards right, I can always revert back to whatever setup I had previously - computers are neat that way.
Learn Flakes the Fun Way
Posted on Jul 8 2024
This post is a Flake-based rewrite of Learn Nix the Fun Way on fzakaria.com. I really enjoyed the content of the post and wanted to write it as a Nix user who is just using and prefers Flakes. It does add a few extra steps and complexity, but I think it’s still valuable and perhaps reveals a bit more about Nix and why it’s pretty fantastic. I also include a few neat things that are more Flake-specific at the end.
But yes, it’s basically plagiarism.
Fetching Go Modules via `goproxy` Inside VPN
Posted on Feb 29 2024
I think I finally setup the holy grail of universally being able to fetch-by-proxy go modules through a firewall using https://github.com/goproxy/goproxy
Things I Use
Posted on Jul 6 2023
I saw a post recently on ye ole fediverse that asked developers if they have a “uses” page and I was inspired to create mine. I wrote up just about everything I use on a weekly basis.
iex and dbg/1 without pry prompts
Posted on Jun 22 2023
I love iex -S mix ... but I usually don’t like when dbg asks me to pry.
Just show me my data! Well, today I learned about iex --no-pry:
Teaching TypeScript to Help You with Events (Generically)
Posted on Jan 18 2022
I wanted my custom event system to have all the nice typed goodness and it took me a lot of brain-twisting and a couple of meetings to finally rubber duck it out. Now, I will share my hard-won knowledge with you!
Using Ecto Reflection for Simple Admin CRUD Forms in Elixir's Phoenix
Posted on Mar 28 2019
If you’re working on a Phoenix project, you probably realized the client might want to view (or even – gasp – edit!) their data in a pretty raw form. Frameworks like Django provide this out of the box. Phoenix, however, leaves this up to you!
Elm: Forms, Fields, and Abstractions
Posted on Mar 20 2019
If you’re using Elm, you’re probably dealing with forms and fields. You’re also probably wanting to do functional programming “right” and compose smaller functions together. Hopefully this helps!
Mirroring Gitea to Other Repository Management Services (GitHub, GitLab, etc.)
Posted on Mar 13 2019
I have a Gitea instance I self-host at home. I keep most of my repositories there, but I recognize that most other developers and potential employers will want to see my work on GitHub.
Weechat & Matrix Encryption Guide
Posted on Mar 7 2019
There’s a new-fangled Python WeeChat plugin that supports end-to-end encryption. This guide will walk you through what is currently a semi-annoying setup, as the entire project is still under heavy development.