Patrice Neff

As I am in the handover process as a result of leaving Squirro, I am looking at and handing over a lot of the projects I worked on over the years. A purely internal one of which I am particularly proud is the Coffee Chat Scheduler, which I have now handed over to our operations team. This project originally started when I decided I wanted to be more connected to our over 100 colleagues across the various locations. We have most people on hybrid work at our headquarters in Zurich, but also work with colleagues across US, UK, Poland, Serbia, Greece, Malaysia, and Singapore. In a physical office you meet around the coffee machine or the water cooler. In a virtual setup, these random moments need to be created in a different way. Other people would just pick up the phone at random times (I admire Dorian for being able to do this consistently) but to me this doesn’t come easily. I can’t help but worry about catching them at an inopportune time, especially due to time zone, or interrupting their focus. ...

After 18 years, I will leave Squirro at the end of October. I will obviously stay connected to the company as a shareholder and strong supporter. At this point I have no concrete next step planned and will take a breather first. Back in 2008, while at local.ch, some of us discussed how to better work with information. How can we better make use of all the data that we get bombarded with every day? Those conversations with Toni Birrer, Dorian Selz, Felix Hürlimann, and Chris Hauzenberger led first to Memonic, a note-taking app, and then to Squirro, now an enterprise generative AI platform. These are two products that look very different on the surface but actually had the same vision backing them: continually use the right data to back work decisions. ...

On September 27, 2026 we are organising the first dedicated Backyard Ultra for Kids in Zollikon, Switzerland. The goal is to run for as long as possible (with a sensible upper ceiling in place). If you have a kid aged 3 to 15, come and join us at this event. They will surprise you with how long they can last in this format. Check out the Kids Backyard Ultra website and follow kidsbackyardultra on Instagram.

Over the Easter weekend, we played a version of hide and seek on a grand scale, namely in the public transport network of ZVV, in the Swiss canton of Zurich. This game was very heavily inspired by Jet Lag: The Game, in particular their Season 9 (Hide & Seek Switzerland). There were nine of us (four adults, five kids) participating. We split into two groups and set off. The rules we followed are detailed below. ...

I recently spent a long day and night debugging a SAML login issue over at Squirro. Eventually we found out that the xmlsec version shipped with RedHat Enterprise Linux 8 is broken for signing. Error Introduction As part of our Single Sign-On implementation we use pysaml2. That library in turns depends on xmlsec, a library supporting XML signature and encryption. In the deployment we were debugging we saw that the xmlsec1 call was erroring out: ...

TL;DR: I’m shutting down list.blogug.ch and stats.blogug.ch, unless you save it by taking over. Over the past few years I have been maintaining parts of the blogug.ch project, namely the list and the stats. I haven’t done any actual development on those since 2006 but they have been running fine. From time to time I even confirmed the blogs to make sure they match our community guidelines. But time has been short for that and the list of unconfirmed blogs has been constantly growing with nobody else picking up the slack. This even though a few people have admin access and access is liberally granted. And of course the stats project shows that people just aren’t blogging anymore. ...

To stay updated on all things geek I have been relying a lot on Hacker News lately. But not by using the main web site which would steal too much time from the work I should be doing. Instead I use two great services, one for daily and one for monthly updates. Hacker News daily is a blog where each day the top 10 Hacker News stories are posted. The stories are deduplicated, so only new information is shown. Using Google’s Feedburner I converted this into a newsletter. Feel free to subscribe to the resulting Hacker News Daily Newsletter. ...

I have a simple password policy: every account gets its own password. To manage this I store them in a password manager. When switching to Windows one of the most painful things was replacing that password manager for which I had used the Mac Keychain. It’s a password storage, secured with either the login or a separate password. It integrates extremely well into the system. Apple even ships pre-installed Subversion clients and SSH agents that store their passwords in the Keychain. And for non-integrated applications, getting a password out is relatively easy using a simple keyboard shortcut. That is topped off with secure notes for credit card information and similar. ...

A few months ago I switched from Mac to Windows. The reason was work. At Memonic we develop a consumer application which should work well for non-geeks and average consumers. But a while ago I noticed that at our office every single one of us was either on Mac or Linux. While you can test Windows apps well enough using VMWare that just didn’t happen in practive — not least because of the heavy memory tax of running Mac and Windows side to side. ...

Over on the Memonic blog I blogged about why and how we work with Python at Memonic. As the original blog is now archived, I later reproduced the article below. Python Fun fact: Memonic is written entirely in Python. Why did we choose this particular programming language? After all - aren’t all the serious developers on Java and the cool ones on Ruby? When we thought about the programming language to use, we already knew how our architecture was going to look, namely that we’d have a frontend and lots of small backend web services. That’s a setup we had previously implemented successfully at local.ch. But at local.ch we had the frontend in PHP and the backend in Java. At Memonic we wanted everything to run on one language so every developer could feasibly work on the whole stack. This threw out PHP which isn’t so great for daemons and services (but I still like it for frontend work, especially with Okapi). We then had Ruby, Java and Python in the race. Without going into detail about why the other two languages suck ;-) Python won us over because of it’s maturity and the very wide selection of frameworks and libraries. ...