deanh77Founder

The very first substantial thing Dean Holdren contributed to eZabel was a three-part algorithm for implementing threaded comment rendering, posted unprompted in 2001 after iwz mentioned the problem. He laid out the data structure, the recursive traversal, the indent logic, then offered two alternative implementations — one computationally intensive, one database-intensive — and asked to see the schema diagram so he could refine his approach. Ian responded with what amounted to stunned admiration. This was Dean's opening move on a community platform ostensibly built for socializing, and it tells you everything: he showed up to a party and immediately started optimizing the floorplan.

He was a computer guy from Edison, New Jersey — an Xterra driver, a commuter, a Vonage employee who forwarded job openings to friends and whose promo code was literally "97FROMDEAN." He minored in Applied Mathematics in college, took a class called Numerical Methods of Computation "which is like calculus on acid," and once worked at CVS in the Rockaway Mall where his official title was, by his own reckoning, Vice President In Charge of Refuse Disposal and Box-Crushing. He used to ride the eight-foot loading carts like oversized skateboards through the mall at night. When he got laid off from a real job, he processed his feelings by driving around eating pizza and then calling his parents, which he described with the exact emotional precision of someone who finds sentimentality physically uncomfortable. whoknows replied with a raw, grateful rant about shared unemployment misery, the kind of response you only get when someone's honesty lands exactly right.

Dean's humor was architectural — he built jokes the way he built code, with clear logic and a satisfying payload. When someone posted about competitive hot dog eating, he researched the weight of a hot dog bun (0.09481 pounds), multiplied by fifty, arrived at a grand total of 10.99 pounds, and then apologized that he couldn't factor in water absorption because "I'd have to do experiments on the absorptive qualities of hot dog buns, and the average dipping speed of the contestant in question. I just don't have the experimental data, sorry guys." When someone asked about the origin of Halloween, he explained it derived from "All Hollow's Eve," a night when "the streets were full of rotted out tree trunks, submarines, and empty coconuts." His deadpan was so dry it sometimes took a second read to confirm he was joking. He Googled "dean is" and reported back that Dean "is preparing to betray our brothers and sisters with aids" and also "is currently road testing a number of possible apparatus which will allow the iguanas to reestablish adequate security." When someone needed to find South Park scripts online, he delivered a tutorial on search engines that spiraled into a meditation on spam, male enhancement pills, and a caffeine crash: "I lost my train of thought in a caffeine/sugar induced mid-morning crash. short answer: Google."

His forum distribution tells the story cleanly: Movies and Television led with 212 comments, followed by Geek Chat at 177 and Programming at 102. He posted a grand total of six times in Food and five in Macking. He was there for the ideas. He had a near-complete collection of every Red Dwarf episode on CD, learned what "bangers and mash" was from watching it, and could identify a Hitchhiker's Guide reference when nobody else caught it — then expressed genuine disappointment in "ezabel geekdom" for missing it. He read Kurt Vonnegut with real affection — Mother Night was "one of my all-time favorite books, wow" — and championed Stanislaw Lem's Solaris, Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, the Narnia books, Roald Dahl, and Jeff Noon's Automated Alice. He listened to Gorillaz and Deltron 3030 "for lyrical rap about being a black man in the 31st century, about hackers shutting down space stations, and intergalactic rap-battles" and tracked down Kool Keith deep cuts because he heard about them on a college radio show he used to tape and listen to all week during his commute. When forrestina got him the Roald Dahl books and a Holy Grail DVD for a gift exchange, his gratitude was so earnest it practically vibrated off the screen.

He snowboarded at Mountain Creek every chance he got — bought a season pass while unemployed, drove to Colorado for four mountains in five days, hit Snowbird in Utah and Breckenridge and declared them transcendent. He tipped experienced snowboarders to practice riding switch while teaching novices so they'd both be learning something. He had nine points on his license and once navigated home from work entirely by dead reckoning after Route 80 closed, keeping the sun in front of him and to his left, taking wrong turns through farms, ending up in Chester, and finally surfacing near a pet store in Roxbury with no idea how he got there. He found this delightful. He was the kind of person who stopped for baby geese crossing the road and got viscerally angry at the driver ahead of him who kept inching forward: "geese, he couldn't be 2 minutes late to his crap job and watch some nature." In the same season of his life, he watched baby swans riding on their parent's back down the lagoon behind his parents' house at Long Beach Island and reported it with quiet wonder.

His technical contributions were staggering in both depth and generosity. He explained SQL joins, Java Comparators, Python string manipulation, Ruby on Rails single-table inheritance, caching frameworks, Spring dependency injection, and MythTV configurations with the patience of a man who genuinely enjoyed the act of teaching. He helped ilikebirds with electronics projects, walked yay through .NET versus Mono platform politics, debugged skaorsk8's Sprint reception issues by sheer force of diagnosis, and once told someone the correct approach to workplace network restrictions was simply not to circumvent them because "you'll probably get caught." He built a MythTV media center from scratch, hacked a Wii browser to stream video on day one of owning it, maintained a wish list as a personal reading queue, and bought a MacBook Pro through a bait-and-switch outfit by tricking them into shipping it to him — a story he promised to journal about but characteristically never did because he was already onto the next project. When he married, his wedding exit song was a band's cover of the Tetris theme, which is perhaps the single most Dean Holdren fact in the entire corpus. His crew — Ian, fivezero, forrestina, ilikebirds, thefunkyfresh — knew him as the guy who would dismantle your logic puzzle gently, apologize for being so efficient, and then build you a better one.

eZabel Personality Type: INTP — "The Architect." He thought in systems, found genuine pleasure in following a problem to its logical conclusion, and was gracious enough to explain the whole journey to anyone who asked — even when the journey involved hot dog bun absorptive qualities, the orbital mechanics of fictional satellites, or why an ellipsis is really just three periods that formed a club.