Hi, I’m David Haney. I currently live in the Detroit Metropolitan Area of Michigan with my family. We moved here in late 2023. Prior to Michigan, I lived in Florida for 14 years. Prior to that, I was born and raised in Canada.

I have been programming most of my life. We didn’t have a lot of disposable income, but my dad was given a home computer for his day job which was quite the luxury. It was a Macintosh SE/30 with an 80 MB HDD. I can still remember all the unique and quirkly sounds it made. Fun fact: to this day, turning on any Apple computer still makes the same warm-toned “Happy Mac” chime.

I was fortunate to be able to play with that machine in the evenings. I cut my teeth on HyperCard and QBasic, and started a love affair with video games playing such classics as Lode Runner and Spectre.

I continued to program throughout my childhood, building websites on GeoCities by teaching myself HTML through the reverse-engineering of other GeoCities pages. I remember HTML being exciting because it turned code into visuals (most stuff I had done before that was command-line output).

I graduated with a degree in Computer Science and went into the workforce full-time around 2008. It was hard to get a job, because I had no real experience (I was never able to land programming internships during my degree) and it was the middle of the 2008 housing market collapse. Also, I thought I was a LOT more skilled as a programmer than I actually was at the time, so ego didn’t help. Eventually I landed at an oil & gas company doing Java work (which is what I learned in my degree also). After a year or so there, I was assigned a .NET project. I quickly fell in love with C# and have been working in it ever since, even to this day.

A quick timeline:

  • Since 2011, I’ve spoken at numerous tech conferences. My most popular talk is scaling Stack Overflow to 100,000,000 monthly users .

  • In 2012 I started this blog to share what I learned in my programming career as I worked. My consistency in posting comes and goes over time, but I always strive to write useful stuff.

  • In 2014 I ended up getting my dream job at Stack Overflow where I worked for over 9 years. I entered as a Developer and left as the Senior Director of Engineering. It was an incredible experience and time in my career. I still remember my interview with Joel Spolsky like it was yesterday.

  • In 2020 I started building a live programming interview tool in my evenings and weekends to solve a problem we had in our interview process at Stack Overflow. We loved to pair program in our interviews, but we used Google Docs with monospace fonts and this wasn’t a particularly great candidate experience. We checked out a lot of popular programming interview companies but they all pretty much did the LeetCode / HackerRank programming question library thing and that’s not how we wanted to interview people. So I reimplemented the operational transformation algorithm that is at the heart of real-time collaboration in Google Docs in my pet project, which was at the time called CodeInterview.

  • Since 2022, CodeInterview has been called CodeSession and is growing rapidly! It turns out lots of other companies like to interview developers collaboratively too.

Want to get in touch? You can reach me a few ways: