My name is Danny Hermes. I am a bit of a mix between a mathematician and a software engineer, but either way I really enjoy thinking about hard problems.

I am passionate about building high quality software. I am focused on tools that eliminate toil and create delight to maximize productivity in engineering organizations. I thoroughly enjoy programming and problem solving: thinking at the abstraction level of a function, a file, a package, a service or a system are all very rewarding. I deeply value communication as a software engineering discipline, which comes in the form of programming interfaces, documentation, code review comments and design documents to name a few.

Throughout my education and career I've gained deep expertise in cloud computing, developer tools, distributed systems, scientific computing and applied mathematics. As a software engineer, I've invested in learning my tools and the idioms of the surrounding developer communities.

I enjoy spending time with my family, coding (usually in Go or Python), amateur wrestling, MMA, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and following Michigan's basketball and wrestling teams.

Thanks for visiting my blog!

When and Where

• Grew up a farm kid in northwest Illinois
• Graduated from the University of Michigan¹ in 2010
• At Google, I spent almost 3 years as a Developer Programs Engineer (2011-2013)
• Google Cloud Python client libraries open source (2014-2018)
• UC Berkeley PhD in Applied Mathematics (2013-2018)
• Staff SWE Blend, where I focused on scaling the infrastructure as Blend grew rapidly in the years leading up to IPO (2018-2022)
• Co-founder and Head of Engineering / CTO at Hardfin, building financial software for equipment manufacturers (2022-2024)

1. Go Blue! ↩