About

My name is Brandur. I'm a polyglot software engineer and part-time designer working at Heroku in San Francisco, California. I'm a Canadian expat. My name is Icelandic. Drop me a line at brandur@mutelight.org.

Aside from technology, I'm interested in energy and how it relates to our society, travel, longboarding, muay thai, symphonic metal, and the guitar.

I tweet often.

Projects

These are the open source projects that I'm currently working on:

  • Parched — A minimalist Git-backed wiki with support for Tilt's set of template engines, syntax highlighting, and MathJax.
  • Dorian — A personal identity manager and aggregator written in Rails 3.1. The site you're looking at now is a running demo of this project.
  • Facts — A tool for getting smarter and winning arguments. Coupled with a command line interface and a Twitter bot.

Articles

I blog about technology and other interesting things. Here are the latest articles that I've written:

Books

These days I try to read mostly non-fiction. My entire reading history is available online. The most recent book that I read was Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick.

Facts

I maintain a facts database to retain knowledge and try to make myself smarter. Most recently, I added facts on Fennel. Get a slow stream of random facts by following @factsproject.

Twitter

Microblogging lowers the barrier of broadcasting interesting things online. Here are my latest tweets:

  • Amazing. Sex Bob-omb / Garbage Truck just played at DNA pizza. I pretty much come here for the music videos. 3 days
  • Wow, seriously, Netflix doesn't even have the Matrix? Final straw. 5 days
  • How Weird is on today! Why am I down here. http://t.co/8DioemNJ 7 days
  • Walking into a Starbucks now feels like an artifact from a past life. 7 days
  • Elsewhere, you time your sprinklers to water your lawn. In SF, you time them to water your pavement. http://t.co/jf886oew 8 days
  • Oh, and forgot to tweet this. Check out our new SSL endpoints: http://t.co/9hfCUh0o 15 days
  • Finding the Wiggle, a route that nearly became a park, but didn't because this is North America and roads are better. http://t.co/ooUqlqvw 15 days
  • First K&L wine club shipment is in. Now waiting for a special occasion. http://t.co/FIh1mUHb 15 days
  • That's a sizeable messenger bag. http://t.co/3h013UDe 15 days
  • SF Bike Party is so much win. I wanted to post some photos, but nothing I took could possibly do it justice. 15 days

Every one of my 1,098 tweets

GitHub

GitHub is today's resume for the professional coder, and is deeply integrated into my workflow. This is my latest activity:

See my Github profile

Self-development

These are my current goals for continuing self improvement.

  • Meditate 15 minutes per day to clear the mind, and maintain focus.
  • Be the machine. Don't give into every emotional need, think about what your goals are and how you're going to accomplish them. 1
  • Set goals every week. We're all wired for weakness, and some of us choose to be strong. 2
  • Chase meaning, not happiness. 3
  • Don't focus on yourself. Focus on others and genuinely like them. Everything you learn will be from other people. 4
  • Use stoicism's negative visualization to lead a happier life. 5
  • Wake at 4:30 AM, and finish personal projects in the 2-3 hours before work. 6
  • Work on tangible stuff, document it, and claim credit. 7