Other facts about me

Here you can find some random and potentially useful facts about me.

My name

My first name is pronounced da.ni'ɛ.le. For native English speakers, pronouncing dan-yell-ae will get you pretty close to it. Feel free to call me Dani (everyone, including my family, calls me that way) or Dan.

My surname on the other hand is a real challenge if you don’t speak a southern European language.

Feedback

I believe that great relationships are based on great feedback. Because of that, I greatly appreciate receiving direct feedback about me, both positive and negative, as soon as possible. While I will accept the feedback, expect me to ask questions about it. The reason I do this is to better explore its details, so I can plan my future actions more carefully. So please don’t be afraid and hit me up with your most honest feedback!

Likewise, expect me to provide you feedback whenever I have some. Please let me know how you prefer to receive it, else I will do my best to guess your preference.

My office hours (in UTC)

I’m a morning person: my attention usually deteriorates as the day goes by. I start working at about 7:40 and leave around 15:20 to go pick up my daughters from school. After that, at about 15:40, I’m back at my desk to finish my work day for roughly another hour. I aim at having a 1 hour lunch break from 11:00.

All this is the ideal schedule, which may not always happen in reality. I am very flexible with my schedule and sometimes I even work in the evening. This is particularly useful to keep close contact with folks living in American time zones.

On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday I skip the lunch break to then go training (climbing). This is also blocked in my calendar. This doesn’t apply from June to early September as the gym follows summer schedule.

Other facts about me

• Although I’m not at the clinical level, I think I have some degree of OCD. I’m the kind of person who feels the urge to sort a list alphabetically. Yes, the lists of markdown links at the bottom of each page are sorted.
• I don’t have any sort of university degrees. I dropped off from computer science engineering university after a year because I was getting bored. So I trained myself to be a systems engineer instead.
• I sometimes make very technical/nerdy jokes. I try to refrain myself when I realise that the audience can’t get them, but sometimes they slip out. Please accept my apologies in advance if that happens to you.
• On a similar note, I’m the one who throws jokes in the middle of an outage. Some people may label this as unprofessional or even feel insulted. The reality is that I have been in far more outages, some of which almost catastrophic¹, than I can remember. The most important lesson that I’ve learned is that desperation will only have a negative impact on the situation. Conversely, keeping a good mood in the face of adversity helps pulling the best out of engineers and keep them engaged.