SeanBoisen.com

SeanBoisen.com is Alive Again

2026-09-20T14:30:00-07:00

After a multi-year hiatus, SeanBoisen.com is finally back up and running. I've rebuilt things using Pelican, with the hopes that i'll be able to do better both at posting legacy content (most of my earlier presentations are back; sermons, papers, etc. are yet to come) and restarting blogging without too much friction (beyond my own inertia).

I'm really not sure how long it might have taken without the help of Claude: issues included

getting the domain registrar pointing at the correct hosting site's nameservers (and some fixing on the hosting side itself)
setting up SSH keys, getting the right key in the right file, getting them authorized, then failing to write down the passphrase so having to go through all that again. That took at least a dozen rounds of interactions.
Trying rsync, finding shell access wasn't configured, a long digression where we tried lftp only to find it didn't work and SSH kept falling back to password authentication. Then starting ssh-agent, checking the lftp build: this eventually resolved to a "failure ... in how lftp negotiates the SFTP protocol handshake on top of that already-successful SSH channel."
At this point I took Claude's advice to go back to sftp, and then eventually rclone (so the same unchanged content isn't uploaded repeatedly), with a painfully long set of configuration questions.
Numerous homebrew installations of programs I don't understand along the way. 🙃
Further content questions on file naming, metadata, internal linking, and a tag-URL bug (TAG_URL/TAG_SAVE_AS mismatch).

All told this whole thread took more than 70 interactions: but Claude never lost the plot, and coached me through both tricky issues and my newbie questions. Maybe i would have been able to figure it all out eventually, but I can't imagine how long it would have taken. All this stuff is just paint-by-numbers for me: it's rare that i do this kind of system-level stuff.

The real proof will come down the road: can i remember the right incantations to upload new content, and will Pelican's static site approach protect me from the hackers I struggled with previously? But I'm thrilled to have things working again, and looking forward to getting some fresh content here.

PyCon 2026

2026-05-17T00:00:00-07:00

I first started learning Python when I took a job at Logos in 2007. Two people i respected and admired--my BBN colleague Lance Ramshaw, and my internet influencer/friend James Tauber--had told me about Python, and a new job seemed like the right time to try it out. I did, and never looked back: Python, and later Django, became the mainstay of the work my team and I did in curating and building Bible datasets and knowledge.

Since joining the Python community, i've attended a number of PyCons ()Python conferences), including the most recent conference in Long Beach. I've regularly found a lot of value from the tutorials in learning in depth about new topics, as well as the talks on various subjects. It's a bit like a buffet of knowledge, sometimes with a very full feeling afterwards.

I recently preached on Acts 17, the Apostle Paul's visit to Athens. As some Greek philosophers debated with him in the marketplace, they questioned his unfamiliar message: the NIV renders their comment as "What is this babbler trying to say?" The Greek word rendered "babbler" is only found this one time in the New Testament: it's σπερμολόγος (spermalogos), literally a "seed picker", as in a bird picking up seeds from the ground. This term had come to have the figurative meaning of someone who picked up bits of knowledge, attempting to appear knowledgable.

For me, PyCon can be a similar experience: I go from talk to talk, looking for bits of programming insight, or new libraries or framework, that might be helpful. Looking back on notes from previous PyCons, some things proved useful and have become part of my toolkit. Other things seemed interesting at the time but never "stuck". But it's very hard to know in advance what will pay off: it's just part of the experience.

Anyway, some highlights from PyCon US 2026:

Pamela Fox's tutorial on MCP Build your first MCP server in Python was clear, with great materials (including "there's more than way to do it" instructions) that left me confident I could reproduce the approach on my own data.
I learned about reactive notebooks at Daniel Chen's tutorial on Shiny: i'm looking forward to taking that further with Marimo.

Unfortunately the tutorials were not recorded this year, but some of the materials

Trying Pelican

2025-05-17T14:11:00-07:00

I'm trying Pelican as a way to resuscitate my personal website. WordPress is convenient but too hard to maintain over time: I was regularly playing whack-a-mole with hackers. But I want a place to share my thoughts: i've found blogging has often been a helpful discipline to crystallize my thoughts as i'm exploring new directions. Here's hoping Pelican will be easier.