Happy 11111th birthday to dbrock, my brother, nomadic blockchain hacker

If you think you've spotted @dbrock, glance at his laptop. Look for a full screen Emacs editor with huge fonts, jumping around buffers of smart contracts, shell scripts, or unusual-looking JavaScript code.

Someone in a cafe in Groningen, Holland once remarked: "I've never seen text... move around, like that... man."

@dbrock, Daniel, is my older brother. He's a blockchain hacker, web wizard, and nomad. Today is his birthday!

Here are a bunch of reasons why I think Daniel is really cool and why he's a role model and inspiration for me.

His GitHub profile lists his location as "Schengen area" which is a good approximation, though he's known to also hack in Miami, Denver, Seattle, and in rural Thailand, including one time on the sixth level of a sacred temple mountain.

Today he's in Prague, heading next to Berlin where we'll meet up, then checking out my place in Riga... and then he's off to Shanghai for the Ethereum developer conference.

When I quit my job in Amsterdam, Daniel sent me an email asking simply "Want to start a company?" So we did. A couple of weeks later Daniel had arranged a beneficial consulting contract with a Stockholm startup.

Daniel has been a prolific reader and writer since the age of four. This inclination informs his view of programming. He has a deep-rooted urge to make code legible, literate, and sensible.

Good writing is clear, effective, and fresh. That's what Daniel's code is like: perfectly following the grain of the language but always in an interesting way. He has an uncanny talent for evaporating complexity.

Artists get away with styles otherwise considered strange. Daniel once replaced our mail server with a working SMTP daemon written as 66 lines of bash. He can condense a thousand lines of CSS into a dozen.

My advice: If Daniel is being weirdly enthusiastic about some idea that seems bizarre and obscure to you, check your premises and think about it.

He once wrote an advanced JavaScript web MMORPG with streaming events, translucent movable windows, and AJAX—in 2001 or something, using the cutting-edge features of IE5, years before almost anybody else was even dreaming about such magic.

He invented the "bind" method for JavaScript functions in 2004 and published a paper about it (while in high school). It's now an indispensable part of the ISO/ANSI standard.

He was an early adopter of Docker, which he loves because it lets him keep his own computer clean from silly package managers, language runtimes, and all the strange dependencies other people's programs tend to have... basically everything except bash and Emacs.

He was also early with Bitcoin... and BitShares... and Ethereum... travelling around, eagerly collaborating with whomever seemed to be the smartest and most forward-thinking.

He lived for a while at Ca La Fou, the "eco-industrial postcapitalist colony" in the mountains outside Barcelona, philosophizing about cryptoanarchism with activists like Amir Taaki.

Now he's working with @nikolai and others on Maker, the Ethereum stablecoin, doing some pretty cool low-level smart contracts.

We've had lots of fun together in a way that's hard to come by. Like nights sitting by the Danube in Budapest drinking wine and talking about Graham Harman's object philosophy (hey @dbrock, check out his new book, it's an ontological analysis of the Dutch East India Company). Or retreating to a cabin in the Stockholm archipelago talking about event sourcing in the sauna. Or spending an autumn in Holland coding a mobile app.

Life would be a lot more dull without Daniel around. I'm happy that I get to work with him on cool stuff and talk to him about everything. We've learned so much together. Cheers!

Today his age in years increments to the third Mersenne prime, the fifth power of two minus one, also known as binary 11111 or decimal 31.

Hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray!