The Curious Engineer

All blogs / Python

Andrew Montalenti

amontalenti.com

@amontalenti - Founder/CTO. Coding in: Python, JavaScript, Zig.

PythonLinux / UnixEssays / personalSociety / politics / economy

’00’05’10’15’20’25
Posts
383 from 1 Jan 2000 to 18 May 2026
Posting
now and then (4 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://amontalenti.com/feed

2026 3

  1. From laptop to cloud cluster within seconds (via the PX CLI)
  2. Programming in 2026: excitement, dread, and the coming wave
  3. It’s official: Claude Code has made it a weird year for tech

2025 4

  1. Less mindless scrolling, less mindless listening
  2. Hypernormalization and distrust
  3. My tricks and accessories for working ergonomically on a laptop while on the go
  4. Linux is free and your mind is valuable

2024 7

  1. Linux backup workflow for hackers with restic, rclone, Backblaze B2
  2. Good Python Software
  3. My relationship with digital media in the last few years
  4. The Partially Examined Life: a podcast, a new book, an antidote to doomscrolling
  5. The smartphone app audit
  6. Core Python
  7. Putting Your Media on a Diet

2023 2

  1. The Blog Chill
  2. Dependency rejection

2022 3

  1. Over-Organization (1958)
  2. How Python programmers can uncontroversially approach build, dependency, and packaging tooling (+ a note on Zig)
  3. Turning n/2 + 1

2021 2

  1. Parse.ly, Automattic: the long view
  2. GNU parallel is underrated

2020 6

  1. Managing software teams: the definitive reading list
  2. New essay: The case for a vote to restore jobs and health
  3. Learning about babashka (bb), a minimalist Clojure for building CLI tools
  4. Python 3 is here and the sky is not falling
  5. Best remote work equipment in 2020
  6. Chat with me for 30 minutes about distributed team management

2019 4

  1. Work is a Queue of Queues
  2. JavaScript: The Modern Parts
  3. Parse.ly’s brand refresh
  4. Shipping the Second System

2018 3

  1. Expanding my mind, once more, with functional programming
  2. Flow and concentration
  3. Public technical talks and slides

2017 7

  1. Software planning for skeptics
  2. Lenovo and the new Linux desktop experience
  3. Charlottesville tech: a community that won’t be stopped by tragedy
  4. A Different Way — Thoughtful Financing, Or Why We Said “No” to a Lot of Money
  5. Specialists in medicine: not the problem
  6. The Great Reckoning in Digital Attention
  7. In support of net neutrality

2016 10

  1. Parse.ly Culture: Ethics & Identity
  2. The Internet is a cult generator
  3. He Who Controls Traffic Reigns King
  4. The Twitter growth conundrum
  5. The value of money in a technology career
  6. The 3 best headphone options for programmers
  7. Simple and Universal: A History of Plain Text, and Why It Matters
  8. You won’t know it when you don’t see it
  9. What is a muckhacker?
  10. The media and “objectivity”

2015 8

  1. An async kind of pair programming
  2. Simple Lego Blocks for Big Data
  3. Idiomatic Python Resources
  4. Programming: it’s weird
  5. The 3 Best Python Books for Your Team
  6. Picking tech stacks
  7. Office extinction for knowledge workers and the rise of fully distributed teams
  8. What entrepreneurship really looks like

2014 15

  1. The New Republic as a product
  2. Solving problems with startups
  3. Web interest in Apache Storm, Kafka, Spark in the Python community
  4. Everybody Worships
  5. Clojonic: Pythonic Clojure
  6. “So, you work in IT?”
  7. Python annotations and type-checking
  8. Improving a surface interpretation of “big data”
  9. Joel Spolsky’s business operating system
  10. Delta customer service: exclusions may apply
  11. 5 years ago, I was bored
  12. Disable Google Hangout’s auto-mute on typing
  13. Are “tweetstorms” a new form of publishing?
  14. Truth on tap
  15. streamparse: Python + Apache Storm for real-time stream processing

2013 15

  1. The Log: a building block for large-scale data systems
  2. Functional dynamic dispatch with Python’s new singledispatch decorator in functools
  3. How investors play the option
  4. Parse.ly Press Coverage – August 2013
  5. Parse.ly: brand hacking
  6. Building ships
  7. “We’re killing it”
  8. Uninterruptability
  9. David Foster Wallace on advertorials
  10. The content trading desk
  11. Python double-under, double-wonder
  12. PyCon 2013: The Debrief
  13. Rapid Web Prototyping with Lightweight Tools
  14. Uruguayan President: a radical farmer as president?
  15. Solidify your Python web skills in two days at PyCon US 2013

2012 33

  1. Going mobile in 1998
  2. Questioning the Canon
  3. Smaller buckets and bigger thimbles
  4. Data Rules
  5. “Normal”
  6. Obama: a man, or an idea?
  7. Dark Money Rises
  8. The Future of News… in 1992
  9. Why Startups Die
  10. Reporting is not enough
  11. Information fanaticism
  12. The End of PowerPoint
  13. Fully distributed teams: in lists
  14. The New Novel
  15. The Sullivan Ouster at University of Virginia: a retrospective
  16. New-Age Ed Thory in Practice
  17. My old backpack
  18. Progress Tiers: Epic, Story, Task, Step
  19. Cloud GNU: where are you?
  20. The Debian Manifesto
  21. Digg’ing your own grave
  22. Idleness
  23. Cloud “backups”
  24. UNIX is the kitchen of the software chef
  25. Build a web app fast: Python, HTML & JavaScript resources
  26. Clojure as a mind expander
  27. Fully Distributed Teams: are they viable?
  28. Speed and lightness
  29. On multi-form data
  30. Computer Science and “soft” skills
  31. Getting real about design inspiration
  32. XDDs: stay healthily skeptical and don’t drink the kool-aid
  33. 8 years ago today, I wrote this in a bug report

2011 12

  1. Wall Street (the movie), 25 years later
  2. Why NYC does, indeed, need HackNY
  3. The C++ trap
  4. import this: learning the Zen of Python with code and slides
  5. Engineers don’t become engineers
  6. Turning 27
  7. Upcoming: standing desk setup, Python training, Groovy/JavaScript articles
  8. Capital, public good, and the real economy
  9. Groovy, the Python of Java
  10. Startups: Not for the faint of heart
  11. Understanding Wisconsin protests with big language data
  12. What’s the best part about being a software engineer?

2010 7

  1. It’s easier to play the option than the bet
  2. Pythonic means idiomatic and tasteful
  3. The Startup Diet
  4. What One Does
  5. Non-native New Yorkers
  6. Flavors.me emerges from beta: lifestreaming for the masses
  7. Switching from Chase

2009 15

  1. The danger of feature-driven design
  2. Persistent Folders: Or, why ideas don’t matter, and execution does
  3. Simplifying CSS with 960.gs
  4. Parse.ly presentation at NYC Search & Discovery Meetup
  5. JPMorgan Chase, “valid” $39 overlimit fees, and humanity
  6. Parse.ly releases new version on Sunday, Sept. 20
  7. Chase’s completely insecure and broken “secure” document exchange system (aka securedx, secure-dx)
  8. For Linux/GNOME users: tired of nm-applet? Try wicd
  9. Atul Gawande (MD/author) on the cost of health care in this excellent New Yorker piece
  10. Trouble connecting to GTalk with Pidgin?
  11. We’ve planted our roots, and now we’re growing…
  12. Ubuntu Jaunty installation process
  13. The End of Philosophy?
  14. Favorite PyCon 2009 talks
  15. Beautiful Code and a Beautiful Bug

2008 5

  1. A video interview with John Kenneth Galbraith
  2. The media blackout of Ralph Nader
  3. Is media slant determined by the market?
  4. Joe Conason thinks Ralph Nader “loves” McCain
  5. America’s “first black president”

2007 37

  1. “Facile anti-intellectualism is the order of the day”
  2. Did I miss the nuances of free speech?
  3. Fascism Rising: Suppressing Speech with Tasers
  4. What is Libertarianism?
  5. Unanswered questions
  6. A New Yorker’s Take on San Francisco
  7. In San Francisco
  8. Double-header for Friedman
  9. An Empty Calendar, a Dusty Blog
  10. I Choose the State
  11. Falwell Never Apologized
  12. The Divine Right of Capital
  13. Comment on Amazon for Michelle Malkin’s book
  14. Dilbertization of IT
  15. Nat’s Pendulum
  16. HOWTO: Get microphone, headphone, automute and sound properly working on an HP DV2000 laptop in Linux
  17. “This isn’t elitist, this is egalitarian.”
  18. Hilarious posts on Linux vs. Windows: satire or real thing?
  19. More on Internet Radio: NPR Takes Action
  20. Save Internet Radio
  21. Catching up on the reading list
  22. Finished Dreaming in Code
  23. Dell IdeaStorm
  24. American Thinker?
  25. Dreaming in Code
  26. Open Source Talks at Google, and VIM creator
  27. Way more interesting than YouTube
  28. Spirited Discussion with Miguel de Icaza on Mono and Microsoft
  29. It’s Official Now: Microsoft Stole Java to Minimize Cross-Platform Languages
  30. Software Engineering Management, In a Nutshell
  31. GPLv3: Will it marginalize the FSF?
  32. Finished reading Capitalism 3.0, missed speakers, drank dark beer
  33. Common Criticisms of Linux, parsed and analyzed
  34. Solving “accidents” and “essences” of programming with better languages
  35. The Unkindest Cut
  36. Currently Reading: Capitalism 3.0
  37. Conversation on Torture with Doomsy

2006 36

  1. “The Good Shepherd”: A Good Film Concept, but Lacks a Pulse
  2. Free and DRM-Free E-Books
  3. Embarassed to be an American
  4. The Humanity
  5. The Three-Way Division of Web Development Labor
  6. Linux Desktop Talk at NYU
  7. Taming spam with spamassassin and evolution
  8. The Working Life
  9. Great tool for LaTeX users
  10. Back in the Northern Hemisphere
  11. Military Spending
  12. Italian Restaurant Saga Continues
  13. My Italian Restaurant
  14. Graduated
  15. Colbert Follow-up
  16. Stephen Colbert at White House Correspondents’ Dinner
  17. The Flight of Computer Science majors
  18. Server outage
  19. Changing the tools you use
  20. Sarchasm
  21. Danish Cartoon Follow-Up
  22. Calculus Made Easy
  23. Using C++ instead of GObject/C
  24. Depressed
  25. Danish cartoon display at NYU campus
  26. Bad Eye Candy
  27. Apple and Google: Can We Just Get Over Ourselves?
  28. UNIX Zen
  29. I don’t often quote Bill Gates, but…
  30. Getting the troops mobilized
  31. What’s better, small or big?
  32. The State of the Union: about as good as our most ignorant citizen
  33. My Median Nerve
  34. Dragon NaturallySpeaking working
  35. Outsourcing Homework
  36. Hand trouble

2005 92

  1. 2 Sleepless Nights Later
  2. The Capitalist Pyramid
  3. Site cross-pollination – check out h2h
  4. Two must-reads
  5. My Facebook Profile, and Everyone Else’s
  6. Can you tell it’s finals?
  7. Instilling Doubt
  8. Disclosure: I have never read “Design Patterns”
  9. Slashdot comes through for once: on the viability of open source “business”
  10. Comedy in Real Time
  11. The MDI Plague and Window Management Woes
  12. Refreshing: A World Where Labor Rights Trump Property Rights
  13. Gas prices and fuel efficient cars
  14. My Outsourced Life
  15. Met Runar, Discussed Software
  16. Fog of War: A Truly Thoughtful Movie
  17. User interfaces with GTK+ and Glade
  18. Annotated and Hyperlinked Notes on Professor Dewar’s talk on Software Copyrights, Patents and Free Software
  19. George Carlin goes morbid
  20. Outfoxed and trust networks, revisted
  21. Found out how I got hacked originally
  22. Corporate obligation to shareholders
  23. Sachin Kamdar on Andrew Montalenti
  24. Tom the Dancing Bug Cartoon on Bush
  25. Software copyrights and patents talk
  26. False alarm
  27. Talk on Outsourcing
  28. I believe in corporations
  29. Magnetism in Macro Photography
  30. Essential articles for midterm intellectual relief
  31. Got bored with Descartes and Spinoza, wrote a patch to powernowd
  32. Police officers are disgusting
  33. Development under Windows: why so painful?
  34. Quotations through Corporate History
  35. One of my Pet Peeves, as expressed by WWW creator, Sir Tim Berners-Lee
  36. John Ralston Saul on Lou Dobbs: Globalism is Dead?
  37. I can’t wait till Ubuntu breezy
  38. Lobbying Against America
  39. Slashdot becomes Philosophy forum
  40. Potentiality Principle Strikes Again
  41. Politics in early hours
  42. Windows Installer is Evil
  43. I Lose: Is My Blog Typical?
  44. Just For Fun: The Story of Linus Torvalds
  45. The Cost of This War
  46. Free Coders at NYU
  47. Shame on Us
  48. Recall the President
  49. Incompetent Government
  50. I Just Didn’t Know: Republicans invented the reality then, and are doing it now
  51. Interference in the “free market” is always bad?
  52. Bill Moyers speaks The Truth: The New American Political Movement is Religion
  53. Homeland Security, or the Department of Peace?
  54. Classes change, new schedule
  55. Intelligent Design? Show me the science.
  56. To Snip?
  57. Loaded Terms: Pro-Life, Anti-Abortion, or just True Believers?
  58. Corporate Pork in the Age of “Homeland Security”
  59. Keeping applications open
  60. Real Time with Bill Maher and Conservative Boneheads
  61. Yay, ddrescue saves the day
  62. Sadness and remorse for the worst acts of human history
  63. Gangs of America: The History of Corporate Power
  64. GNU ddrescue and dd_rescue and dd_rhelp, what the?
  65. Fried hard disk ruins weekend
  66. Cindy Sheehan smeared by O’Reilly
  67. On the security of an e-mail address
  68. Microsoft’s anti-competitive behavior
  69. N-way parallel mail retrieval with getmail and bash
  70. Server “secured”
  71. “Hello World” in every language
  72. PIDA: Python Integrated Development Application
  73. CAFTA: Is this democracy?
  74. Exa: a new architecture for Xorg
  75. I am Jack’s raging anger
  76. Xorg goes modular, is now approachable
  77. The Potentiality Argument
  78. Amdahl’s Law
  79. “We will not negotiate with terrorists”
  80. Google Maps is scary
  81. Joel Spolsky on programmer creativity
  82. Mark Shuttleworth on Ubuntu and Debian
  83. Xenophobia and Politics: Is Protectionism Racism?
  84. On Being and Deliciousness
  85. London gets attacked, again
  86. Photos pouring in
  87. First Post!
  88. Leaving for Italy
  89. Good post on OSNews about Linux’s maturity
  90. Doom 3 and modern gaming
  91. 8 1/2 becomes one of my favorites
  92. A Patriot Act

2004 54

  1. New Years Resolution
  2. more vim
  3. Finals: Phase I over
  4. Retchmail
  5. Transparency
  6. Library, woe is me; at least vim has lots of plugins
  7. Programming
  8. Algorithms and vim
  9. The Human Computer
  10. Corporations, Morality, and the Bottom Line
  11. Havoc Pennington’s essay on UI design
  12. Computational consciousness
  13. Laptop returns, cpufreq actually works
  14. The Divine Right of Capital
  15. Cringely’s Realization: Youth aren’t disciplined?
  16. Socialism is not the abolition of property
  17. gob2: Building GObjects easily in C
  18. Resignation is not the answer
  19. There’s Kerry coming around the last bend!
  20. On stupidity and drunken behavior
  21. Linux innovations I recently discovered
  22. wifi detector bash script
  23. The new Democratic Party, post-2004?
  24. Getting Linux to run on an Averatec 3250 Notebook
  25. On the economic “benefits” of globalization
  26. Paradox of Choice
  27. Truly absurd: Assault Weapons Ban Lifted
  28. Trusted computing
  29. The “Tyranny of Time”
  30. Doing the journalist’s job for him
  31. Good chair for bad back
  32. Mbox de-duper patched
  33. Good article on programmer productivity
  34. It actually crashed
  35. Unfahrenheit 9/11?
  36. Spike in the geekiness curve
  37. Levels of abstraction
  38. MultiTail and syslogd’s heartbeat
  39. Why don’t things just work?
  40. On keeping things
  41. 300 lines of (careful) code later…
  42. Busy days
  43. I love Dilbert
  44. NFS sucks
  45. Murphy’s Law: Murphy was an optimist
  46. SSL and high school reunion
  47. If you want something done right…
  48. Project Outsourced on Lou Dobbs
  49. Work begins today, computer fixed
  50. Hardware instability
  51. Leadtek Winfast A360 (GeForce FX5700)
  52. Links
  53. libranet-archive
  54. New design

2000 3

  1. 8½ – a beautiful mid-life confusion
  2. Oppenheimer analysis upon second viewing (spoilers)
  3. Succession finale analysis (spoilers)