Patrick Schless. Technical co-founder & CTO at The Community Journalism Project. Previously Braintree, TempoIQ. Notes on shipping, infra, and small newsrooms.
Recent
2026-06-032026-05-122014-03-292014-03-012014-02-222014-02-09
Tools That Pause the Loop
Free-form text is the right input when the user is driving the chat. When the AI is the one asking, a "real" UI is a stronger user experience.
AI As Externalized Context
Side projects used to die in the gap between sessions. Then I stopped trying to carry the context in my head.
TorVM for QubesOS
Creating a VM using KVM & Proxmox
XenServer Recap
Xen Workflow - Migrating a VM
Building
SINCE 2020
Community Journalism Project
Trying to keep community newspapers alive. The unglamorous operational work — subscriptions, circulation, distribution — so they can stay focused on journalism.
BUILDING NOW
PushForward
Conversational fitness AI agent. Synthesizes Hevy, Google Fit, and other tracker data into one coherent picture of your training.
Past
2015–2022
Lewis County Press
Co-owned 12 Missouri community newspapers. Sold the papers in 2022; the software we built to run them spun off as CJP.
2012–2015
TempoIQ
Time-series database startup. Managed the engineering team — backend, devops, frontend, devx.
2009–2012
Braintree
The small-team years, before the PayPal acquisition. Ruby backend, Puppet, Linux — wore many hats.
2007–2009
Medical Decision Logic
An oncology research platform deployed on-site at Washington University School of Medicine. Ruby on Rails.