About Dan McKinley

Hi there. Here are some of the basic facts.

  • I grew up in Western Pennsylvania, about an hour north of Pittsburgh.
  • I graduated from Cornell in 2002.
  • I currently live in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, New York City.
  • After college, I worked in the financial industry for a few years. This is generally regarded as regrettable. (All of the Microsoft-related content around here is from that period.)
  • These days I work for Etsy in Brooklyn. I’ve been there since mid-2007. It keeps me very busy.

Regarding development, I more or less work on everything. I am a jack of all trades, and I guess master of none. I like Python, jQuery, Postgres, Haskell, Emacs, Lisp, and so on. I have severe disdain for C++, Java, PHP, and XML, but so far haven’t figured out how to avoid them.

Here are some things I’ve made or contributed to, that have not to date resulted in legal threats.

  • Feed Each Other was a social feed reader that I worked on with Udi Falkson. It must have been ahead of its time, because it is now defunct. You should check out Udi’s other site, Is it Normal.

  • PGProxy - A unit testing proxy for Postgres. This makes it easy to keep test cases in a large suite from trampling on each other. See my more in-depth post about it here.

  • Etsy Haikus - A quick hack I made that randomly generates haikus from the titles of recent Etsy listings.

    (Not affiliated with Etsy.)

  • sql-admin.el - This is intended to be a database administration tool along the lines of mysqladmin or pgAdmin, but contained within emacs. It’s maybe 25% of the way to being useful to somebody. When I actually have spare time again I imagine I’ll pick this back up.
  • Well good for you - I sat next to Eric Smith for eight hours a day for a long time, and his horrible habit of wasting money on ridiculous domain names rubbed off on me.
  • Miscellaneous Emacs Modes - I’ve contributed to pastie.el, bm.el, and probably some other things that I’m forgetting.
  • Mike Summersgill - My friend Booter insisted that I build a monument to his gluttony.

If you want to find me other places on the internuts, here are some things that I will admit to using.

  • Dan McKinley