Skip to main content

That wasn't the pigeonhole I expected

I went to the BYU CS alumni dinner tonight. At one point they briefly put everyone's name and position on a projector, one at a time. (At five seconds apiece it wasn't as tedious as it sounds.)

When it was my turn, it announced "Jonathan Ellis, System Administrator."

What the hell?

It turns out that when I RSVP'd I said I was a "python kung-fu master & sysadmin of last resort." (In the sense that, if you really can't find a better sysadmin, I know enough to be dangerous.)

Don't bother trying to be clever around bureaucrats.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Yeah, but putting "python kung-fu master" on your tax return has got to feel good. :)
11:00 AM
Anonymous said…
I work in the CS Department office, so while I wasn't involved directly with the dinner, I know a fair amount about what went on behind the scenes. I post this to help put a bit of a face to the bureaucracy.

Keep in mind that the person who compiled the slides had to compile a *lot* of them (including slides for people that didn't show up), and had limited space to work with to keep things readable in 5 seconds. She's not a technical person, either, so likely the editing meant finding the thing she understood or recognized from other titles. There were also plenty of other things regarding preparations for the dinner that were keeping her busy as well; dealing with strange slides wasn't a high priority.

Next time, I'd recommend just using Senior Python Developer, if that's the pigeonhole you want. :)
1:54 PM
Jonathan Ellis said…
Thanks, anonymous face of the bureaucracy. :)
3:07 PM
neeber said…
What could be better than having a 'witch doctor', and a 'kung-fu master' in your linkedin network?

Your recent job/title change has made my linkedin contact list 50% less wacky!
9:16 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Missing Piece in AI Coding: Automated Context Discovery

I recently switched tasks from writing the ColBERT Live! library and related benchmarking tools to authoring BM25 search for Cassandra . I was able to implement the former almost entirely with "coding in English" via Aider . That is: I gave the LLM tasks, in English, and it generated diffs for me that Aider applied to my source files. This made me easily 5x more productive vs writing code by hand, even with AI autocomplete like Copilot. It felt amazing! (Take a minute to check out this short thread on a real-life session with Aider , if you've never tried it.) Coming back to Cassandra, by contrast, felt like swimming through molasses. Doing everything by hand is tedious when you know that an LLM could do it faster if you could just structure the problem correctly for it. It felt like writing assembly without a compiler -- a useful skill in narrow situations, but mostly not a good use of human intelligence today. The key difference in these two sce...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why PHP sucks

(July 8 2005) Apparently I got linked by some PHP sites, and while there were a few well-reasoned comments here I mostly just got people who only knew PHP reacting like I told them their firstborn was ugly. These people tended to give variants on one or more themes: All environments have warts, so PHP is no worse than anything else in this respect I can work around PHP's problems, ergo they are not really problems You aren't experienced enough in PHP to judge it yet As to the first, it is true that PHP is not alone in having warts. However, the lack of qualitative difference does not mean that the quantitative difference is insignificant. Similarly, problems can be worked around, but languages/environments designed by people with more foresight and, to put it bluntly, clue, simply don't make the kind of really boneheaded architecture mistakes that you can't help but run into on a daily baisis in PHP. Finally, as I noted in my original introduction, with PHP, ...
30 comments
Read more

PyCon Python IDE review

I presented an IDE review at PyCon last Friday. It was basically a re-review of what I thought were the 3 most promising IDEs from the Utah Python User Group IDE review , to which I added SPE, which was by far the most popular of the ones we left out that time. The versions reviewed are: PyDev 1.0.2 SPE 0.8.2.a Komodo 3.5.2 Wing IDE 2.1 beta 1 I'd intended to base my presentation around a comparison of writing a smallish program in each of the IDEs, but the more I tried to make this not suck, the more I realized it was a losing proposition. Instead, I decided to try to focus on the features in each that most set them apart from the others (both positive and negative); this seemed more likely be useful. (I did a new feature matrix for this review, which is included after my comments. The slides I used are also up, at http://utahpython.org/jellis/pycon-ides.pdf , but aren't very useful absent video of the presentation itself. Hence this post.) PyDev PyDev has g...
43 comments
Read more