The pseudonymous structural engineer who turned "why did this break?" into a twenty-year blog about bending macOS to his will - one fully-explained script at a time.
In October 2025 he was still at it - posting a fresh set of Markdown link scripts for BBEdit, AppleScripts that quietly hand off to Python utilities. No course to sell, no newsletter funnel, no merch. Just code you can steal, and a paragraph telling you exactly how it works.
That is the whole Dr. Drang proposition, and it has barely changed since 2004. He writes a small program to automate something dull - renaming files, parsing an invoice, archiving his own tweets - and then he publishes it with the source laid bare and a painstaking walkthrough of every moving part. Readers do not get a finished product. They get a pattern to copy and reshape until it fits their own hands.
"Many of his posts describe the little scripts he writes to automate the dull, repetitive things computers ask of him," is how the blog reads to regulars. The scripts are deeply personal by design. He treats automation less like software engineering and more like tailoring: a good script should fit one person exactly, which is why he would rather teach you to sew than sell you a suit.
The day job grounds all of it. Dr. Drang is a practicing civil and mechanical engineer with a Ph.D. in stress and structural analysis. He spends his professional hours, by his own account, "figuring out why things have broken." Failure analysis as a vocation has an obvious echo in the blog: a man who debugs collapsing structures for a living finds debugging a recalcitrant Mac entirely natural.
What makes him unusual in the Apple-blogging world is what he refuses to do. He largely avoids the news-cycle churn of gadget reviews and rumor roundups. He is not chasing a media brand. He is an engineer who happens to write beautifully about code, mathematics, music, and the occasional bit of politics, and who has spent two decades proving that a single thoughtful voice can outlast a thousand hot takes.
In real life I'm an engineer who spends most of his time figuring out why things have broken.
"Drang" is the German word for stress, and it lives inside the title of a famous old engineering text on the subject. So "Dr. Drang" is, quite literally, Doctor Stress - a pun that lands only if you have spent serious time staring at load diagrams. It is the kind of name you choose when you assume your audience will share the joke, and most of his readers do.
The anonymity is practical, not coy. He adopted the pen name to keep his online and professional lives apart - specifically so that prospective engineering clients Googling his real name would not surface his musings on regular expressions and AppleScript. The persona, he insists, is otherwise an honest reflection of who he actually is. He has let slip only a few personal details over the years: married, three children, American.
He is cheerfully self-aware about how little the pieces fit together. The blog is called "And now it's all this," it lives at leancrew.com, and the author goes by Dr. Drang - three names with no relationship to one another, a mismatch he chalks up to a poor sense of marketing. Even his age is encrypted: ask and he will tell you he is 33 - in hexadecimal, which works out to a number he would rather you compute yourself.
Drang is the German word for stress.
He writes nearly everything as Python inside BBEdit, drops into AppleScript when he needs to make Mac apps talk to each other, and reaches for Shortcuts and Keyboard Maestro to wire the whole thing to a keystroke. The languages are a means; the fit is the point.
The workhorse. Most of his published scripts are Python, edited in BBEdit, doing the real parsing and logic.
The connective tissue between Mac apps. He even wrote a Python module to run AppleScript via subprocess - then rebuilt it for Python 3.
Shortcuts, Keyboard Maestro, Drafts and TextExpander turn the scripts into something he can fire without thinking.
His most-starred project: a set of TextExpander snippets for wrangling URLs without lifting your hands off the keyboard.
Printing scripts for TaskPaper, turning plain-text task lists into something you can put on paper.
His own homemade Twitter client. When the off-the-shelf options annoyed him, he simply wrote a better-fitting one.
A utility to archive your own tweets - quietly prescient, given what later happened to the platform.
A clipboard-history tool, the kind of small daily convenience that the Drang philosophy lives for.
A personal wiki system - because the best note app is usually the one you wrote for yourself.
Works as a practicing civil and mechanical engineer, specializing in figuring out why structures and machines fail.
Launches "And now it's all this" at leancrew.com under the Dr. Drang pseudonym.
Featured in 512 Pixels' "Writers I Read" and profiled by Macdrifter for his text-based writing workflow.
Sits for "A Coder Interview With Dr. Drang" on CodeProject, talking tools, hardware and habits.
Guests on Relay FM's Automators (episode 21): invoicing, writing, and regular expressions.
Rewrites his Python "applescript" module to work on Python 3.
Still publishing - new Markdown link scripts for BBEdit land in October.
In real life I'm an engineer who spends most of his time figuring out why things have broken.
Drang is the German word for stress.
If you and Terpstra had a baby it'd take over the world.
The age dodge. He gives his age as "33 in hexadecimal" - leaving the actual arithmetic, fittingly, as an exercise for the reader.
Code with a conscience. His scripts ship under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike. Take it, change it, pass it on.
The Arctic vault. GitHub stamped him an Arctic Code Vault Contributor - his repos are literally archived for the long now.
Same handle, different room. He keeps a Flickr under drdrang too, because the persona travels.
He built his own Twitter. Rather than tolerate someone else's client, he wrote drtwoot to suit himself.
Off the news cycle. He deliberately steers clear of mainstream Apple rumor blogging - the opposite of chasing clicks.
Compiled from public sources · leancrew.com · github.com/drdrang · 512 Pixels · CodeProject · Relay FM Automators
Dr. Drang writes pseudonymously; this profile contains only publicly stated facts.