Chris Patti writes about software, systems, accessibility, books, platform work, and the occasional well-deserved rant.
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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 haunted static site generator.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 right tools and have the courage to see things as they truly are.
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 administration consoles where all input was in the form of numeric codes :)
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.
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.
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.