A Day in the (Work) Life of… Dan Duvall

First off, I want to congratulate writerbean for giving us the most GUMPO for Blobby's "Day in the (Work) Life of…" post.  

If this isn't GUMPO, then I don't know what is:

GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO! GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO! GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO! GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO! GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO! GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO! GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO! GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO GUMPO!

That's 72 GUMPOS, folks. Blobby likes!

For the next installation of "Day in the (Work) Life," we'll get to know more about our Tech hero Dan Duvall.

Things I know about Dan:

He often eats pie for breakfast.
He's tall.
He's an insanely organized and detail-oriented IT manager.
He just got a hip new bike.
He is an excellent dancer.
He has two screens: one with normal stuff on it and another that has a bunch of DOS-looking gobbledygook on it.
He has a desk that can be either a sitting desk or a standing desk.
He comes up with the best metaphors to explain complicated techy concepts to staff.
He is an excellent singer.
One time, he shaved his beard.
Oh, and he may or may not play the keyboard.

What I don't know is exactly what Dan does during a given day while sitting (or standing) at his desk.

First off, do you play the keyboard? If so, what is your favorite song to play? If not, why in the world would I possibly think that?

I do play, mostly jazz, though never often enough and never well enough. The song I play most is definitely "Blue In Green" by Bill Evans. When I was growing up, "Kind of Blue," of which "Blue in Green" is the third track, was my introduction to jazz, and probably my first love.

We met at a Borders, in the cultural hub of San Ramon, California where the diametric flavors of Baja Fresh and Bagel Street Cafe are so sharply juxtaposed. After a quick get-to-know-ya among fleets of overt and ostentatious box sets, and an awkward exchange with an assuming cashier, we were both eager to get comfortable in my parked car, where cellophane and naïveté fell away in candor and quick succession. Anyway, you get the point and this is kinda silly.

I love that track, and used to fall asleep to it every night for the better part of a teenaged year. It encapsulates a time in my life that seemed hopelessly lonely and renders it rich and meaningful.

Secondly, what's with the two screens? How do they work? What's on the DOS-looking one? Perhaps you can explain this magical screen using one of your amazing extended metaphors.

Having two screens is the bee's knees! And highly addictive! It lets me see so many things at once without having to tab through a stack of windows all the time.

I use my larger display for my front-and-center applications like Mail, Safari, MacVim, Excel, and once in a blue moon, this Word thing. MacVim, my text dominator, is where I spend most of my time coding, writing tests, or slaying random search-and-replace encounters.

However, the engineering of applications doesn't simply entail writing code. It also requires, among other things, frequent execution of tests, running of scripts, manipulation of directories and files, and deployment to servers. All of these tasks, and my sys-admin tasks, are most easily accomplished, for Unix geeks such as myself, with (DOS-looking) command-line shells! My terminal of choice is iTerm—it was the first to have OpenGL acceleration (what, what!)—and my shell of choice is Bash. Their playpen is my laptop screen.

These "little black boxes," as a friend used to call them, are especially powerful when tackling simple but repetitive tasks. Imagine someone has instructed you to move a giant pile of rocks from one side of the yard to the other for no pragmatic reason—hey Dad, you're probably not reading this but I'd like to concede that it did build character. Now imagine that you were given the ability to use a computer to do it, but you must choose between a graphical interface (GUI) and a command-line interface (a shell). With the GUI, it's still manual labor: click shovel, click pile alpha, click wheelbarrow, click pile bravo, click, click, click… (drink Mom's lemonade, feign illness, return to pile). With the shell, you would just think about the task for a moment, and hammer out something like this:

"(while there are rocks; do throw rocks; done) < big_pile_o_rocks > somehow_bigger_pile_o_rocks_wtf"

Blam-o.

What types of IT tasks do you like to do while eating your pie in the morning?

So many things can be done while eating pie. Why restrict it to IT work, or work in general? I like to think about the next time I will eat pie.

Where did you learn all your amazing dance moves?

I don't consider them all that amazing. I'm just hopelessly goofy and I try to keep it real—even when it goes wrong. The most important thing is to let loose and plant your flailing extremities somewhere on the beat; the downbeat is preferable. When you've got that down, try some hip/torso flares and some leg kicks. Now you're doing the G.I. Joe®.

Are there tasks that you like to do while standing at your desk opposed to sitting at it?

There's a lot more shuffling of feet when I'm standing, slightly more nervous file saving, and definitely fewer outbursts of gibberish. I have no idea why this is, really. To be perfectly honest, I think I'm less productive when standing, but my back feels so much better!

Finally, is there anything on your desk that you'd be willing to give away to our blog followers? If so, how could one win this amazing prize?

Oh no! I hate parting with toys! Well, let's see… I can't give up Bubba, my succulent. How about Tangerine Ninja? He makes me nervous anyway, always offering to "relieve" me of my "head weight," whatever that means. Tangerine Ninja goes to the comment with the best dance move description involving food or the digestive process.

Good luck!