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Well, well, well. Here we are in 2025 and Python packaging has finally been fixed. Not by the Python community, mind you - they had their shot for about 20 years. No, it took the Rust folks to come in and show us how it’s done. The Long, Painful History Let me paint you a picture. Back when I was starting out, we had distutils. That was it. Then came setuptools, which was supposed to fix everything. Then pip showed up to handle installation. Then virtualenv because global package installs were a nightmare. Then pipenv to combine pip and virtualenv. Then poetry because pipenv wasn’t quite right. Then pip-tools for deterministic builds. Then conda for scientific computing. Then… ...

Post on linked-in John Schreiber passed on July 29th, 2025. Remembrances will be held tomorrow, Saturday 23rd of August at Darcie Kent Estate Winery and Pete’s Brass Rail and Car Wash. Please also check out https://tinyurl.com/JohnSchreiber if you’d like see some pictures and video of John enjoying life. Comments Steve Schiro commented on linked-in: ...

It was fun to feed the Lorakeets at Busch Gardens Williamsburg this week. We kept missing them by a few minutes so we were so glad that we got to make it in finally. I tried the Merlin app in there, but it only detected the American Robin. I’m not sure if it ignored the exotic birds because they don’t belong in Virginia.

Introduction Like many, I’ve usually kept my charitable giving private — and I’ve respected that choice in others. But recently, a few people have asked where they might consider donating. Since I don’t see a need to keep it to myself, I’ll share my recommendations for anyone interested. I’ve organized this around a few themes. For each one I will link to the organization’s website and the Charity Navigator rating. For all of the organizations mentioned below, I respect them and I have personally donated to them at least once, but often over several years. I’m leaving out organizations that I don’t want to donate to for various reasons and local charities, but I may revisit those topics someday. I’m also not including much commentary on each one since I’m hoping you will find your own reasons to like them and contribute. ...

Disclaimer I am not a significant member of the Redis community. I have not used Redis on a regular basis. I’ve discussed Redis more in interviews than during regular work. My few work encounters with Redis have been using Elasticache. These facts would discourage me and should discourage you from having me as your next redis admin. Despite all of that — I have been part of the free software and open source communities for many years. With all of the tumult around licensing with prominent open source companies in recent years I am well positioned to talk about companies and their relationships to their communities. ...

Overview Slack and other services include a Scheduled Send feature which allows you to send a message at some point in the future, without further effort on your part. Initially Slack limited this feature to channels, but recently it was also expanded to work in threads. So now seems like a good time to consider why you might want to take advantage of this feature. Generally we’re happy to send our Slack messages in real time and we hope for an answer within moments. The asynchronous nature of Slack lends itself to sending messages regardless of what time of day it may be for any of the parties involved. But there are occasions when asynchronous has downsides and for those times, Scheduled Send is your friend. ...

These long trains are preventing Amtrak trains from getting through on time. We only sat behind it for 3 minutes, but we couldn’t even see the start of the train in the distance. Thanks to all of the graffiti artists who keep our coal trains looking so much less boring than they otherwise would. Meta Filmed on a Samsung S24+ Edited in iMovie

Eventually this blog post is going to work around to being a review of “Microservices Pros and Cons” by Curtis Poe. It is going to meander a bit before it gets to the review, but I haven’t found a way to leave out this “preamble”. In some sense it is beside the point, but in other senses it is the whole point. YMMV. Presumption of bias I would guess that most innocent bystanders reading a title like “Pros and Cons” would assume that the author intended to present a balanced view of the topic at hand. Having been in the computer business for the last thirty years I presume every author has some ax to grind. ...

It was an honor to be part of the excellent team at #Tubi! I saw amazing efforts from folks across our engineering org to ensure that this would be a success. We all learned something new. 😃 The above was my comment while reposting Pascal’s post which said: Tubi streamed Super Bowl LIX flawlessly. That is a real accomplishment, not the result of luck but very hard work from a large group of people across a wide range of activities. Especially, I could not be prouder of my Infra and Security team who provided a super solid setup for that to happen, at a scale 20 times what we had ever done. Our work might not be the most shiny and glamorous, but without this team there would be no service at all. So huge kuddos to ...

My reaction to getting this posted I’m so happy and relieved to have my first technical video on youtube. There are a few things I wish I had included, particularly more on decorators like OS and groups. Yet the video is also longer than I was hoping for and there’s nothing I wish I had cut out. ...