Recent content on M.C. Pantz
The terminal is still where most developers live. The UNIX philosophy of being able to shuffle data from one application to another is essential when one’s job is building things; reusable components are a critical necessity. As such, when developers build tools, even when not thinking about interoperability, the first class audience is the terminal. Now with LLMs making it almost trivial to…
pcmantz at mcpantz dot org Experience Workforce.com Sept 2025 - Dec 2025 Senior Software Engineer Chicago, IL Worked with an international engineering department to build features for Workforce.com’s payroll and tax engine in a monolithic, multi-national application using Edge Rails (8.1) with high levels of internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n). Leveraged AI coding assistant…
After fourteen years of disuse, I have decided to take the effort to dust off this old domain and blog and to try to breathe some new life into it. There have been many projects that I have wanted to talk about publicly, but haven’t had the spirit to fight against a languishing OctoPress installation. Thankfully, this current era of LLM-driven development has made it manageable to dissipate…
I use Emacs to manage multiple different projects simultaneously. Every professional engagement I’ve had so far has had me working on multiple codebases at once. Add these to this my elisp and Org Mode files, and that’s a lot of frames to have open! My first attempt at managing multiple projects had the unintended consequence of holding me back from fully realizing the full potential…
I am setting up an OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) machine as a development machine. For my own personal use I prefer using a Linux box, but between my own nostalgia for Gentoo and the peculiar yet undeniable strength of homebrew , I am perfectly happy to use it as a day-to-day development machine. In order to use homebrew to its fullest, I edited the /etc/paths file to make things right:…
One of the most productive “A-Ha!” moments I’ve had as a developer came when I learned how to use iterators, and the dramatic effect that it has on my coding style. When we introduced the concept to one layer of code to handle a specific problem, the pattern of development proved infectious for dealing with similar workflows and managed to make our code much more succinct and…
Within the next 24 hours, my GitHub Page should be accessible any- and everywhere from my preferred vanity domain, mcpantz.org . Right now I am having it redirect as a top-level domain, mostly for shortened URL length. I would love to hear of any downsides, other than some sort of fragility in long-term resource names. Also, I need to find a decent image post, as numerous of my WordPress-era posts…
I attended my Fourth YAPC::NA this past week, and just as usual, I had a blast. Conferences are valuable experiences that allow one to step back and re-evaluate one’s work compared to the Zeitgeist of the community. There were a lot of excellent talks this year, and even more that I didn’t see. The one that left everyone’s jaw on the floor was Martin Holste ’s Perl For Big…
I converted all my old published content from mcpantz.org to this new GitHub page. Once I confirm that everything else is in place I am going to cancel the other page, and save a few bucks on hosting. In the meantime, enjoy any content that you may not have seen before. If you are redirected to this page after the domain name switch; apologies for the broken link. Please use a newer, more stable…
I get a lot of benefit from managing my own Perl via perlbrew, but I’m fine using Ubuntu’s packaged Postgres sever. However, Ubuntu strips down a lot of its applications into components, and you have to install development versions and header files separately if you want to compile everything. I’m putting this here for anyone who might be trying to install DBD::Pg on top of…
In the ruby world, many people are aware of the ruby rvm tool for ruby version management. Perl is not generally thought of as a virtual machine with an isolable environment, because of its frequent deep intertwining with the host operating system. However, there are tools that make this possible. The problem with using Perl in this fashion is not that the solution does not occur to people, but…
I have started work on a new project where a lot of the source files are huge; files are commonly over 1,000 lines in length. While this is a massive code smell that needs to be dealt with, it doesn’t preclude the necessity of working with the file in the first place. It appears that emacs has no problem navigating the files, but editing large files is a royal pain in the rear end. It…
I’ve been an Ubuntu & Mint user for the past few years. I am not particularly focused on usability or community, but it is nice using an operating system where most of the kinks have been ironed out for me by the efforts of others. Lately, I decided to abandon Terminator in favor of rxvt-unicode , a.k.a. urxvt . Already I’ve found it to be a lot snappier, but installation was not…
Today, I gave ruby’s ecosystem of web tools a try. Wordpress isn’t a good blogging solution for me, but i would like to have a public-facing, non-site-specific blog to pass about. I am giving Octopress a try for managing my my non-machine readable output. I am enjoying the prospect of using a completely flatfile blog; as that means I have one less moving part to worry about. Hopefully…
I just requested a CPAN account last night. Hopefully I’ll have the gumption to throw up all those that I feel are missing that I’ve been missing that I would be very happy to add. one of them is glob-match support in perl that’s file-system agnostic. Of course, My first module’s going to be a result of some Scav Hunt tomfoolery, which I’ll be sure to post about…
What did i do this weekend? I helped build a loft , that’s what. And it was awesome. Next up on the agenda: I feel sometimes that I’m the leader of the software interests at PS:1 somewhat, so I’m going to make an executive decision on this. I have many, many different projects going on aside from hacking, so I can’t show up at the space every day like some of the more…
After a bit of database corruption sweeped under the rug, I’m back and as ornery as ever. However, this has brought me to an empasse, as I didn’t know what to do with Wordpress in the event of a disaster. However, I could manage to hack Movable Type pretty well, as it’s written in a language that doesn’t make me want to choke up bile, and I’d feel more like…
If you’ve known me for any length of time, you’d know I hate mornings. We’re not talking cutesy Garfield grumpiness, we’re talking it’s-sharp-objects-time distaste for life. College let me cement a lax schedule in my life, and working from home lets it continue. Over Christmas break, my sleeping schedule got completely discombobulated, since I had about eleven…
For the past few months I’ve been working with a friend of mine to establish a hacker space in Chicago. When we started, ther was ofthen just the two of us attending, and whoever else we managed to unsuspectingly wrangle into attending. For those of you unfamiliar with the idea of a hacker space, let me give you my vision of the project. Most of the people involved in this, including myself,…
So here we are in 2009, and in between the hangovers and days off people are considering what they’d like to achieve this year. I already accomplished my major goal (see last post), but there’s still much I’d like to do before I feel like I’m living a completely sane and productive life: I’d like to start working out again. I don’t specifically mean getting…
When I turned 18, I was staying with my aunt and uncle in Champaign, IL; soon on my way to college. The first thing I did that night was go down to the nearest convenience store and bought a pack of black and milds. That didn’t quite strike my fancy, so I switched to Marlboro Reds. Since then, I’ve been a pretty hardcore smoker. I did manage to do a really good job of cutting back for…
Why yes, I would like to beat up my boss! Aren’t there much better ways to go about this? Maybe like the USPS 100 Man Kumite? Stock Broker Bumfights? I’m sure they could do better than this.
How do you like having an extremely extensible, mature, and stable text editor. I sure do. One thing that always bugged me when writing code is going through and finding all sorts of annoying trailing whitespace. For most major modes, tabs are converted to spaces for consistency, but trailing whitespaces are neglected. I was considering writing an elisp function to go ahead and take care this…
http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com I invite all of you to view the source of this site, which is exponentially hilarious.
I’d never been to Hot Doug’s before, but I’m certainly glad I went: That’s a half-eaten merlot and blueberry venison sausages, and a kangaroo sausage with chili mayonnaise, with duck fat fries lining the top right of the image. Life is good.
For being in Chicago for almost five years, I’ve been fairly lucky as I’d never been mugged. I always wondered if it was because I didn’t look like the type that would be packing a fat wallet, because I’ve certainly traveled alone at night enough to put myself at risk. Last night, I was riding home on the L, and the train was one stop away from where I get off. I was pretty…
My good friend Karl and I were on our way back from Lollapalooza last week when we happened upon this vehicle carrying two passengers from the Blackstone Hotel. I apologize for the bad image quality, my Blackberry Pearl has crappy image quality.
Google Labs just released Lively , a supposed contender to Second Life . I played the latter a decent amount to see what it has become, which is mostly a desperate cry for more and more attention. People will wander about looking for someone to talk to, and run into a variety of weirdos. I predict a combination of late 90’s AOL chatrooms , IRC gaming, or any other effort at suspended reality…
Because I’ve never had one. Frankly, most poetry that gets handed off to me, I have a very low opinion of. However, a bit of googling led me to this highlights collection , and refreshes my opinion of the beauty of brevity of words. Can anyone else recommend poets that are capable of delivering the full value of their words without making it feel like a laborious, overwrought exercise? Just…
…I left my combat boots in San Francisco. Seriously, when I was out in Sunnyvale for work for the week. To clarify, my job shipped me out to the Bay area for a week, and a couple of long weekends. A couple coworkers of mine are spending their time off camping & climbing, I decided to hit San Francisco and stay with Christian Perry of SF Beta and Room Full of People fame. I’ve had a…
Depending on how well you know me, you may or may not know that I love music. Anything from trouncing about in goth clubs to mulling about indie concerts, I’m all over the place and enjoying myself. I just bought tickets to the two largest music festivals in Chicago, the Pitchfork Music Festival and Lollapalooza . Pitchfork, is by all respects, these days an incubator for the next big things…
I have been fighting with Samba recently, to get it configured correctly. I only wish this wasn’t such a black art, but it’s what I do. I had thought backups were working, but something far more sinister was happening, and I didn’t know what to do about it. A coworker of mine recently suggested that we hang out in the #amanda room on irc.freenode.net , so I hopped over to #samba.…
If I haven’t already given you an ecstatic phone call or instant message, then I should tell you that I’ve just accepted an offer from Zmanda as a design engineer. I feel really lucky with this; as I’m going to be working in my most familiar language (Perl) to make some fairly robust code user-friendly. I’ll be heading up a new project to investigate adding a new…
A gem of a post came across my alma mater ’s computer science mailing list: Prime detection using regular expressions . It’s quite a clever hack; what it actually defines is all numbers that are not prime, but the negation of that creates the primes. It’s that pesky /\1+/ that makes this whole expression work, and it’s what prevents this regex from being a regular…
Ever since I was a kid, I wanted a legitimate excuse to use that phrase. Thankfully, it seems that io9 has found a few good ones.
So I don’t know if any of you are familiar with Dr. Fun , but it’s a webcomic that I’ve been reading since i figured out what webcomics were. At some point in my college career I realized that the author was lurking around the basement of the Regenstein, the library at the University of Chicago, but I never went to go ferret him out. It turns out that he’s directly my…
A couple ex-coworkers and I have come up with a startup idea and bought some domain names. I can’t divulge much, but I assure you the idea is very worthwhile and completely hilarious.
There are about a million things I feel like I could be doing to prepare myself for employment. Unfortunately, I am considering so many divergent paths that’s there’s no real good way to get them to feed into each other. I get the most immediate feedback from tyoing around with this blog, but I know that I’m probably get the most financial return from studying massive amounts of…
If I haven’t already foisted it upon you, I decided to create a blog outside of the standard venues of Facebook and Livejournal. I did figure, however, that I wouldn’t gain much traffic this way, so I decided to do the analog of Moodblast and ‘blog-blast’ to all four corners of the internet with my WordPress site. You should be able to comment back with both other sites,…
Hello everyone, My name’s Paul Mantz and I’m starting a public blog. I plan on putting my professional endeavours here; as well as my hobbies, interests, and other such things I may want public feedback on. So sit back, relax, and enjoy the show.
Hello! My name is Paul Mantz. I am a developer specializing in dynamic languages, systems, and web development. In addition to my technical meanderings, I am a dad, an occasional homebrewer, and music afacionado. I studied Computer Science at the University of Chicago . For a more professional-oriented overview, please check out my LinkedIn profile .