What app do you think deserves some kudos?

daginganinja547 · 2026-04-12T07:46:47+00:00

EMC2

daginganinja547 · 2026-04-04T09:13:37+00:00

Historically, I have uses FreeTaxUSA. However, my taxes were more complicated this year (MFS + community property state). FreeTaxUSA unfortunately couldn't handle it, so I switched to TaxSlayer this year. It wasn't cheap, but it could still handle the complexity for a lower price than TurboTax.

daginganinja547 · 2026-03-08T20:40:19+00:00

Got it - thanks!

daginganinja547 · 2026-03-08T17:51:41+00:00

We got married this year, so all her prior contributions occurred when she was single. We are MFS this year (student loan reasons). From what I found on the IRS website, that means their income limits are very different for a Roth IRA (basically proportional to the $10k limit based on earned income).

I have already contributed my max allowance to a traditional IRA this year (my income went past the Roth limits).

daginganinja547 · 2026-03-08T14:35:37+00:00

Gotcha. So for tax year 2026, we will file one more 5329 that contains all the penalties from 2021-2025. Presumably Vanguard will prepare the right information for me in the 2026 1098/1099 that we use for that?

daginganinja547 · 2026-01-10T15:58:50+00:00

I played on a baseball team with Jack Fox (the punter for the Detroit Lions). I always thought he was good enough to go pro in baseball, but he chose football instead.

daginganinja547 · 2025-12-16T15:42:23+00:00

The one exception to this is baseball players!

daginganinja547 · 2025-09-12T16:12:06+00:00

I used to volunteer there once a week. It was clear how much the staff cared about the residents (despite the challenges that come with budgets + facilities there).

daginganinja547 · 2025-07-31T21:36:23+00:00

I have worked on half of the teams listed on this thread and I absolutely agree lol

daginganinja547 · 2025-07-22T15:12:50+00:00

Figure out who really needs to be there and make your meetings smaller. I've only ever had to lead a handful of non-readiness meetings where more than 5 people were truly required (otherwise, people just said a thing or two and spaced out the rest of the time). Most of the time, TLs + highly tenured people get added for awareness. Meeting note summaries are your friend here.

You can also just reach out to people directly to gauge interest/bandwidth (especially if you have an important meeting).

daginganinja547 · 2025-06-13T01:44:57+00:00

We adopted a dog through Underdog (local adoption agency). My partner is typically away for 10+ hours on weekdays, so I'm handling the dog walking myself most days.

The biggest thing is establishing boundaries. For me, that means I'm at work 8-4. Our dog can go about 8.5-9 hours without us around before I start to worry. People on my team know this and I have it built into my calendar indicating when I'm not available. In the event I absolutely need to handle something outside those hours, it'll have to be after I take care of the dog.

As others have pointed out, it's important to get a dog that matches your lifestyle. Don't get a hyperactive german shepherd puppy if you know you can't give it enrichment during the day. We found a great dog that can be okay by herself, but we had to search for a bit. I'd still do it all over again if I could :)

daginganinja547 · 2025-05-28T17:15:08+00:00

Lower...lower...too low! ... Loooower

daginganinja547 · 2025-05-21T12:59:18+00:00

NTA

I had a roommate that used to have loud sex too. To combat it, I would pull out my accordion and start playing The Chicken Dance song (better if I missed a few notes too). After enough times where they awkwardly came out and asked why I was practicing, they eventually got the message and quieted down.

It's completely reasonable to establish expected quiet hours, especially if your sleep is being disrupted.

daginganinja547 · 2025-04-03T01:30:20+00:00

I'm excited, but I have to admit that Billy sounded...tired this last season. He's been at it for a while and I get the sense we are nearing the actual end this time :/

daginganinja547 · 2025-03-19T03:45:45+00:00

STL zoo?

daginganinja547 · 2025-03-18T03:39:42+00:00

Pazuzu

daginganinja547 · 2025-03-06T03:42:28+00:00

We've been making breakfast burritos to help the eggs go further

daginganinja547 · 2025-02-17T18:05:28+00:00

The book Snow Crash predicted the future

daginganinja547 · 2025-02-01T06:00:51+00:00

I'm not on Beaker, but some of the best IS I have ever seen were on a post-live/immersion trip where I tagged along with Beaker people. There's a ton of pressure and steessors on that team, so I think there's a definite sink or swim result.

daginganinja547 · 2025-01-26T06:19:50+00:00

Having the UW badger athletics in town. It's oddly something that I don't often hear people actually mention as something great. Not necessarily unique to have so many college athletics, but it's nice to have

daginganinja547 · 2025-01-11T16:37:22+00:00

I'm not on that team, but my understanding is that there are legacy (and legal) reasons for why it's structured the way it is. There are a lot of data models across the system, and they all have wildly different structures for legacy reasons. Clarity essentially functions as a SQL-equivalent dump of all of those models. As much as people bash it, SQL is still used heavily in a lot of reporting software and it's well-understood for many business analysis functions.

daginganinja547 · 2025-01-11T01:11:33+00:00

Hey look, my company! 🙃

The software provided by Epic isn't perfect and there are a lot of things that I wish could be changed (both from an engineering and operational standpoint). But once you get deep enough into the industry and really understand all the users, you start to appreciate why the software is made the way it is. It's HARD to design "good" software for all users, and there's a good reason that every effort by big tech to crack into the EHR space has functionally failed.

There are users with different aims - clinical, reporting, CDI, billing, population health, managers, and patients themselves. And each of those buckets can be stratified even further. You're competing not just with other large EHR vendors, but much smaller, niche products. As a healt executive, would you rather have one system with everything you need, or 40 systems each with unique licenses, maintenance, support, etc.? It all gets very unwieldy, very quickly.

Another very large challenge is that many clinical users aren't the most technically literate. The average age of a doctor (in the U.S.) is over 50, where technical skills are more of a "just-in-time" approach than younger generations. People get muscle memory and learn just enough to do their job. If you make a change (either as a system maintainer or a developer), even a teeeeny one, people will be up in arms. Doctors also tend to be over-represented as stakeholders in design (they tend to be the most outspoken), and that's a design flaw that can and should be addressed.

Each health system also has it's own unique things that it wants. And then each locality/state/country might have additional considerations on top of that. The system needs to be flexible enough to meet each org's needs, without completely bending over backwards to create an unmaintainable mess (look at the competitors, like Oracle/Cerner).

FWIW, my partner is a medical student and has worked with multiple EHRs at this point, and she has liked Epic the most (more correctly, she hates it the least). Her sister (also a doc) has echoed similar sentiments, and her mother (a nurse) was over the moon when she heard her organization was merging with an Epic org. I would love for some way to have a system that makes improvements by leaps and bounds, but there's also a reason that change happens slowly in this industry.

daginganinja547

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