My magazine fame

Jan 24, 2025

As a teenager, I ended up in a Japanese Linux magazine.

I’d taught myself Perl and made an open-source script for saving and backing up configuration. The magazine liked it and featured it.

It felt like magic. Tinkering quietly in the hallway, creating something from nothing and sharing it with the world.

That spark stayed with me, fuelling a career that’s taken me from building complex SaaS applications to founding startups; from leading teams to coaching other leaders.

Along the way, I’ve written wonderful and woeful code, forged technical relationships with the biggest property and parent websites in the UK, sold a side project, founded a meditation app for chronic pain sufferers, and raised $45m with Almanac to build the operating system for remote work.

But success came with struggles: debilitating anxiety in my 20s, burnout in my 30s and a Chernobyl-scale meltdown during the pandemic. Besides the headline events there were also the daily doubts, failed experiments and lessons learned the hard way.

In 2023, I shared my burnout story online. It became the most popular thing I’ve written. Through all the follow-up conversations, I reconnected with my passion for supporting others. A few months later, I started my training as an accredited coach. These days, I coach technical founders transitioning from expert to leader.

In 2025, I want to write more about the craft of building things, the art of leading people and the personal resilience that fuels it all.

Which brings us to Code & Compass.

There are lots of newsletters talking about tactics and frameworks. Those can help. But there are very few taking a candid look at building things from the inside: the doubt, discipline, resiliency and relationships that it depends upon.

I began working in startups because I loved the overlaps between building, leading and thriving. Great things happen in the overlaps.

Code & Compass will be wrestling with questions like:

How to create awesome products that people rave about
How to lead and persuade others to join you in your vision
How to scale yourself when it feels like you’re being digitally waterboarded for 8 hours a day

You’ll learn how to not:

lose your mind
overthink everything
be a mediocre leader
say yes to everything
trade your soul for stocks
build something no one wants
be perpetually busy with little to show

And instead:

work in flow, not stress
improve your decision-making
catalyse your creative process
carve out more time for deep work
work on things that bring you the most meaning
lead with more impact whilst feeling more fulfilled

This is a technology newsletter, but it’s mostly about the humans behind the code: the Perl script was neat, but what supports someone in building that and what keeps them going and growing for decades afterwards?

Thanks for being here! I’m happy to have you along for the ride.

—Dan