I watched football. Then I measured the bitrate.
The picture looked terrible. Naturally, I opened a spreadsheet.
Patrick Wagstrom
I build software and lead engineering teams. I also have a tendency to turn minor technical annoyances into fairly involved side projects.
These days, I’m a Distinguished Engineer at Thomson Reuters, working on AI for legal research and drafting. This site is where the professional stuff meets whatever else has caught my attention.
The work
I work somewhere on the border between engineer and scientist. Depending on the problem, that can mean writing code, designing an experiment, or trying to understand how people work together.
I’ve helped build legal AI at Thomson Reuters, led data and machine learning organizations and teams at Brightcove, Grainger, Verizon, and Capital One, and worked on Watson Conversation and Chef Watson at IBM. Yes, there was a food truck involved.
Before that, I did a Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon studying how people and companies build open source software together. The connection between people and software has been a recurring theme ever since. It’s something that I never get tired of.
A few rabbit holes
An unreasonable amount of attention to terminal colors
A small Rust project with a useful purpose: remembering which machine I’m on.
My firewall had one job.
What finally worked when UniFi stopped taking my rules.