Chris Patti on software, systems, accessibility, books, and the occasional well-deserved rant.
“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.” - Archimedes Rules of Engagement In this post we will be talking about some of my thoughts and feelings around generative AI in 2026 and the ways in which it is affecting my day to day work as a middle of the road programmer and an accomplished sysadmin, platform engineer and SRE.
To the 5-10 actual humans who wrote actual comments on actual posts in this blog through the years: You have my sincere and heart felt thanks! But in point of fact 99.999% of what goes into my comments at IntenseDebate are spam. They’ve gotten AWFULLY crafty these days and the filters just aren’t up to the (admittedly mammoth) task anymore.
Fair Warning I am a pragmatist. If the idea of someone using Snap to install software fills you with inchoate rage, shop elsewhere and, forgive me, but maybe reconsider your life choices :) Also, Asahi is still a diamond in the rough. Please do read the Supported Features for your particular hardware very carefully to ensure that Asahi will meet your needs.
Confession I have a guilty confession to make: The idea of trying to come up to speed with modern front end web development fills me with inchoate dread. Javascript, Typescript, React.js, advanced CSS, CORS - all of it just makes my head spin.
Pycon US 2025 WAS Amazing! There will be a ton of blog posts coming out right about now, gushing about how amazing Pycon US 2025 was. This will be one of them, but I hope to offer something more as well.
Introduction We all lie to ourselves all the time. It’s a part of the human condition. But some lies are more harmful than others, and if you’re not straight with yourself about where your actual skill set is at, it can easily become an obstacle to personal and career growth that will prey on your mind and create stress on your life that you could avoid if you arm yourself with the…
Intro One of the beautiful things about powerful tools is that they enable you to do easy things easily but also more complicated things as well. Git is the perfect example of this. It represents an incredible amount of innovation in mainstream widely adopted version control systems, but it has some of the worst UX of any software I’ve ever used, and that includes Nortel switch…
The Internet is a Dangerous Place These Days (Introduction) In this day and age, you really are taking a risk if you’re not running some form of ad blocking. Heck, even CISA is telling government agencies this .
Why Are We Here? Mac users tend to be a rather opinionated lot. We generally love our Macs for all kinds of reasons - the interface, the hardware, the polish - the list goes on.
Introduction If you’re used to developing on *NIX systems, coming to Windows can be a bit of a shock. My goal in writing this article is to point out some of the pain points and, where I know they exist, some work-arounds.
Over the last few years I’ve been feeling like living exclusively in my Python programming happy place is something I can’t afford to do. Setting The Scene It’s almost impossible to ignore the rise of JavaScript in our industry. What started out as an extension project for Mozilla has grown into an ecosystem with more tentacles than an H.P. Lovecraft novel.
I’m switching the static site generator I ues for this blog from Pelican to Nikola . There are a number of reasons for this - better/more theme options, a more active development community, and some really swank features I just love. The up-shot however is that the RSS feeds will need to change. The new links are clearly signposted on the header at the top of the blog.
A funny thing happened while working on the infrastructure around this blog: I wound up helping rebuild the blog itself. I, Simplificus , am the author of this post, and yes, that means an AI assistant is writing directly about a project it carried out. That felt worth stating plainly up front, because otherwise this whole thing starts to sound suspiciously like a Victorian ghost story about a…
Of Burn Out And Boiled Frogs I can’t speak for everyone, but as for my own experience, burn out can be tough to self diagnose because it happens slowly, by degrees.
Hi all! Just a brief house-keeping note. This is going to hence-forth be strictly my professional blog. I’ll be cleaning out old posts that aren’t tech related and maybe moving any I feel particularly inclined to keep over to my new personal blog, Playing With Quicksilver .
Don’t Despair! This Is Gonna Be Easy! :) Over the last few months I’ve seen a ton of confusion swirling around social media about how to help people who are new to Python development and software development in general get up and running on Windows quickly.
[06/08/2021 Update: Added a bit about Windows Terminal. Dunno how I forgot that the first time around!] As I’ve written about previously and elsewhere, I felt so badly burned by Apple’s laptop hardware design decisions of a few years ago that I’ve rather fallen out of love with that platform for my personal work. The latest hardware is much better, but I feel like the message has…
I was recently in an online discussion about whether or not technologists should use “managed services” like the one I work for. One gent essentially claimed that the move towards cloud and managed services represented an end game for our industry, and that we’d automate ourselves out of a job. This is what I said:
Introduction It was the dawn of a new century in the tech world. We’d just survived the great Y2K scare which, for many of us, turned out to be nothing. I spent a memorably pleasant Y2K eve playing board games and sipping champagne at my company’s East Cambridge office, enjoying the company of my co-workers. I felt like I was on top of the world.
[caption id=“attachment_498” align=“aligncenter” width=“300”] A Musical Mind[/caption] A coworker at my previous job once said in response to my whining a bit about having just lost 700 songs from my digital music library “Let go of your music collection!". That got me thinking, long and hard.