Posts

I had an amazing encounter with the ChatGPT AI today. Someone on the Halihax slack who was working on today’s Advent of Code challenge was bemoaning the absence of a way to tell a Python list comprehension to stop after the first N iterations. That didn’t seem completely unreasonable, but I didn’t know how to do it, so I thought I’d find out if ChatGPT knew how. For those unfamiliar with list comprehensions: in Python there is a convenient syntax for working with lists, so that instead of writing something like ...

The problem with a brand-new blog is getting the first post out. Breaking the seal, so to speak. So to force myself through that, I figured I’d give a quick introduction. I like hats. I’m Rich Lafferty, a site reliability engineer in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, Canada, across the harbour from Halifax. I’ve been doing this kind of thing since 1999 under various titles like “sysadmin”, “ops engineer”, and now “SRE”, and spent a bit of time in a management role as well before returning to an engineering role at PagerDuty where I am currently a staff engineer. ...