When you transition to living together with someone for the first time figuring out how to structure finances can be challenging. It’s important to talk and decide as a couple together how to best handle finances. The first thing to do is to figure out who pays for what and how much. From there you can figure out how to structure the bank accounts. You’ll have to talk with your partner to decide which option is best for you. Sharing Bills With the below examples we’ll assume the couple has a mortgage bill of $1,000 and a power bill of $100 for a total of $1,100. In the Money Flow section belo ..read more

Investing in the stock market doesn’t have to be hard or time consuming. This guide is intended to provide an approach that takes minimal time and can get you decent returns over the long term if you’re investing for multiple decades. Once you learn how and start, continuing is relatively easy. This is a complete guide to getting started. Investing in stocks you heard a “tip” on is a great way to lose money. It’s important to understand what you’re investing in, why, and what the expectations are. This strategy is a long term approach to slowly grow wealth over time with minimal effort as you ..read more

REST, GraphQL, and gRPC are 3 popular forms client-server and server-to-server communication. Choosing can be difficult, so this concise guide can help. In each section, an example will be provided to illustrate retrieving a user. REST Notes HTTP paths describing data, e.g. /users as a collection of users Easily discoverable data, e.g. user ID 3 would be at /users/3. All of the CRUD (Create Read Update Delete) operations below can be applied to this path CRUD operations in HTTP are POST/PUT for create, GET for read, POST/PUT for update, and DELETE for deletion POST with an ID in the path m ..read more

To get a job as a software engineer, most companies have an interview process that includes coding. While these interviews aren’t perfect, they’re widely used, so in order to stay employable it’s a necessary skill to learn how to prepare and study for these interviews. There are plenty of resources online and this guide is a listing of many of these resources to help you practice once you have coding interviews scheduled. To pass these interviews, a few skills are needed: Have a clear, concise, and easy to read resume that describes specifically what you’ve done in school/work. Be prepared t ..read more

As part of my 2020 personal reading plan, I read The Intelligent Investor. Overall, although somewhat dated, the book provided a lot of insightful and still relevant investing advice. A long read, clocking in at 578 pages including the appendices, but not the endnotes, it’s a long read, but well worth the time spent. As I continue to read more books, I’ll be able to form a better opinion on how good this book is, but intuitively what Graham and Zweig talk about makes a lot of sense to me. In the book he says either you’ll “get it” in 5 minutes or you won’t get it at all. Overview The book was ..read more

I’ve worked as a software engineer at 2 FAANG companies, a media company, and 2 startups. Getting into these companies is a skill that can be learned, but you need to start with the right basic knowledge. I’ve attempted to boil it down to a set of guidelines that anyone can follow. What is FAANG FAANG represents a set of companies, which is typically Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google. Some people extend this set to include other large companies, such as Microsoft. This post is intended to help anyone interviewing at any large tech company learn how to interview and find the position ..read more

As part of my investment strategy, I like to automate as much as possible so I don’t have to think about it. As part of this, I’m maxing out my 401k in 2020 with pre-tax and after-tax money and investing it all in a single fund. How I calculate how much I’m allowed to invest In order to save automatically for retirement, one of the vehicles I use is my 401k. In 2020, I am allowed to contribute up to $19,500 pre-tax money since I’m under 50. My employer contributes 4% up to the $285,000 IRS annual compensation limit, which comes out to $11,400. The IRS allows me to contribute up to a total of ..read more

Over the years I’ve acquired a basic level of knowledge in personal finance, real estate, and stock market investing. However, my investing strategy has always been a bit subjective. In order to learn more about how to invest in the stock market and manage personal finances at a better level of detail, I’ve constructed my own aggressive reading plan. While it’d be impossible to cover every possible area, I’ve attempted to read a diverse set of books by different authors in order to learn different strategies that could be used. I’m considering this my fast paced crash course in personal financ ..read more

Hello and welcome to Dan Hacks! Dan Hacks is a blog about technology, personal finance, and travel. I’m a software engineer at a major tech company in Silicon Valley. As an experienced software engineer, I’ve decided to share and give back my knowledge in these areas. I have been programming for approximately 20 years now, have a Bachelor and Masters degree in Computer Science, and have been working in the industry at major tech companies, startups, and a media company for 9 years. Some of my interests, which I will blog about are: Software Engineering Financial Independence Investing Real Es ..read more