Back in college I was deeply inspired by Paul Graham's essays, like How to Make Wealth and How To Do What You Love . His essays helped me realize I wanted to be involved in startups after I graduated. I loved the notions of avoiding the bureaucracy of big companies and being part of a small team doing something big. Fast-forward a few years to 2013 and I was in a predicament about where to go with…
After two years of being open source and a lot of development, Specter has reached 1.0. In this post I'll explain why I call Specter "Clojure's missing piece" and why it should be used in most Clojure and ClojureScript programs. Clojure's glaring hole I've been using Clojure as my primary language for almost 7 years. With it I created Apache Storm which became a large, important, international…
Ingredients Books for a computer science curriculum from a top university Computer Headphones Internet Stress ball Pillow Lighter fluid Food Directions Cover computer science books with lighter fluid Light books on fire Use flames to cook an energy-rich meal for the thousands of hours ahead Pick an editor Choose a project beyond current capabilities. Good ways to push boundaries: Unfamiliar domain…
Two years ago I trained for my private pilot license over the course of nine months. Besides being fun and exhilarating, flying requires a lot of knowledge and skill: aerodynamics, crosswind landings, stall recovery, navigation, recognizing and dealing with system failures, and so on. Something that always amazes me whenever I explore a completely different body of knowledge is the bleeding effect…
I started programming at the age of 10 on my TI-82 graphing calculator. I loved video games as a kid and was ecstatic to learn I could make them myself – while also distracting myself from the boredom of math class. Very rapidly I came to love the craft of programming in and of itself and entered into a long and rewarding journey of nurturing my skills as a programmer. Part of that journey…
In February I open-sourced a library called Specter , and in my own work it has become by far my most-used library. It has changed the way I approach some fundamental aspects of programming, namely how I interact with and manipulate my program's data. I call the approach I take now "functional-navigational programming". I'm not the first one to come up with these ideas, nor is it a full-fledged…
Apache Storm recently became a top-level project , marking a huge milestone for the project and for me personally. It's crazy to think that four years ago Storm was nothing more than an idea in my head, and now it's a thriving project with a large community used by a ton of companies . In this post I want to look back at how Storm got to this point and the lessons I learned along the way. The…
On January 12th, 2012 I went to Airbnb to give a talk about Storm at their tech talk series. It was a public event and quite a few people came. As usual at these events, there was mingling/socializing after the talk. A bunch of people approached me and one of these people was Jake Klamka . There's nothing striking about Jake Klamka when you first meet him. He's a pretty unassuming fellow. So when…
I'm an entrepreneur and a programmer. I've been fortunate to work in an industry that has seen incredible growth the past 10 years. It's amazing that an entrepreneur can launch services that reach millions of people with very, very small amounts of capital. Startups can compete with established services on a level playing field because the internet does not discriminate between different services.…
Update: I originally quoted the average price of office space as $36 / square foot / month, where in reality it's per year. So I was accidentally weakening my own argument! The post has been updated to reflect the right number. The "open floor plan" has really taken over tech companies in San Francisco. Offices are organized as huge open spaces with row after row of tables. Employees sit next to…