Thought leadership

Here are some initiatives I've had significantly before their time. Many have garnered support from the community, and resulted in successful implementations. Others, like Blueseed, proved to be too ahead of their time.

Dan is a visionary. Blueseed is nothing short of a project with biblical proportions.
-- AngelList recommendation

Timeline

• 1998 - After graduating from high school in Romania, applied to a number of US universities. Was rejected by every single one of them. In 2012, spoke at both Stanford and MIT.

• 2003 - translated books on TCP/IP and building web applications (back then with ASP.NET), the latter foreshadowing the web application boom of the late 2000's.

• 2007 - Authored English as a universal language. Let's see how this one pans out.

• 2008 - Wrote a PHP parser in JavaScript that is now used by the Joomla content management system and other large projects.

• July 2009 - Authored Databases are misguided, anticipating the NoSQL movement. Didn't know at the time about in-memory databases.

• September 2009 - Created the Android users wiki, only one year after the first commercial Android phone had become available.

• 2009 - Filler jobs - a writeup on jobs that will be eliminated by technology, extrapolating from current trends

• 2009 - The first FAQ for the popular fitness program P90X. Resulted in numerous user comments, inbound email, and an advertising contract for my website.

  

• October 2009 - I asked noted atheist speaker Richard Dawkins a question that later got over 1.5 million views on YouTube - "One Fact to Refute Creationism":

• January 2011 - First critical review of the muscle building program detailed by Tim Ferriss in the Four-Hour Body.

• Spring 2011 - Founded the Quantified Self Forum. The forum is now the largest online message board for the Quantified Self community.

• Summer 2011 - co-founded Blueseed, the first commercial seasteading venture. Blueseed would be a cruise ship anchored in the Pacific international waters off the coast of San Francisco just past the US jurisdiction (12 nautical miles). Immigration laws don't apply here, allowing entrepreneurs from anywhere in the world to start companies without needing a US visa. The project has received tremendous publicity worldwide and is now on hold pending additional funding.

  

• September 2011 - Initiative to organize laws in wiki format, with the definitive current state of the law easily accessible, and a history of memoranda, addendums, and other updates available to those interested. Other than extensive discussion on Ask Metafilter and Wikipedia, nothing has come out of this yet. However, I've learned that other nations, such as Australia, already have this system in place.

• Early adopter of and contributor to the Meteor.JS web framework, since launch in April 2012. As of January 2015, Meteor has 22,000 GitHub stars and is the leading full-stack JavaScript framework. My StackOverflow account is the all-time #7 answering Meteor questions.

• October 2012 - Requested support from WebStorm, the most powerful JavaScript IDE, for Meteor, the most powerful full-stack JavaScript web framework. After the proposal gathered hundreds of votes from the community, WebStorm implemented support for Meteor two years later.

• May 2013 - Spoke at the Bitcoin Silicon Valley conference

• September 2013 - raised the first legal startup investment directly in Bitcoin

• February 2014 - Understanding Meteor publish/subscribe - StackOverflow post explaining publications and subscriptions in Meteor in accessible terms; has 60 upvotes as of January 2015.

• October 2014 - Why Meteor

• December 2014 - Initiative to provide high-quality Meteor packaging for popular JavaScript libraries. Resulted in autopublish, a system to automatically package 3rd party libraries for Meteor, support from leading Meteor developers, and acknowledgment from Bootstrap, d3, and Font Awesome.

• December 2014 - Make editable the documentation of popular JavaScript UI component libraries Kendo UI and Webix. The best documentation for a library is a join effort between the developers and its users.

• January 2015 - Initiative to create a Material Design theme for Dojo Toolkit. Dojo is perhaps the most technologically advanced UI components framework, but it has fallen off the radar of web developers due to its antiquated themes.

• February 2015 - Meteor-Webix integration

• April 2015 - Documented on Wikipedia and StackExchange and explained clearly for all a pervasive problem that affects millions of online map users in China every day, yet has been poorly and confusingly described since 2008 - the China GPS shift problem. Also created English Wikipedia articles for Baidu Maps and Tencent Maps, online map services used by tens of millions of Chinese every day, none of whom bothered to head to Wikipedia and contribute.