Recent content in Newsletters on The REPL
Notes. I’m happy to be able to say that I joined Whimsical today! Thanks to everybody who helped during my job search. I had some really great conversations with companies using Clojure, and I’m excited to be diving back into Clojure programming full-time. -main re:Clojure has announced their schedule and speakers for the 2021 conference. Lots of great names and talks, I’m…
Thanks to everybody who has contacted me about jobs or sent through tips on people that are hiring. I’ve had a lot of great conversations with people, one thing that’s been neat to see is how widely Clojure is being used across so many different industries. -main Reactive Clojure: You don’t need a web framework, you need a web language Dustin Getz wrote an article describing the…
Recently, I’ve been working on a new office and have finished painting and flooring. I still have a few things left to do: painting and installing the skirting, getting a heat pump installed, wiring up ethernet, and installing acoustic panels to reduce echo. I’m also looking for my next job. I recently left my job at GitHub as a Technical Program Manager to move back to writing…
Notes. New Zealand has been under lockdown for the last month to stop the spread of COVID. Our kids have been home from school and kindergarten. They’ve been very well behaved, except for the time they flooded the bathroom with a toilet paper/water slurry! Things are starting to open up on Wednesday for most of the country. I also got my first COVID vaccination which was good. NZ was pretty…
Notes. I’ve been a bit sick this week, and the kids have been sick the two weeks prior. I’m looking forward to leaving winter behind for this year! -main Rich Hickey’s talk on a history of Clojure is out now. The paper is here. You’ll also get to see Rich’s office (?) with a bunch of neat musical instruments. How are Clojurians handling control flow in their projects?…
-main A post from Arne Brasseur about some changes for how Lambda Island makes videos. Making changes like this can be tough, but it seems like this is going to be more sustainable. Libraries & Books. re-frame-flow helps you visualise a chain re-frame events. Methodical is a replacement for Clojure’s multimethods. It adds some neat features from the Common Lisp Object System, like adding…
Notes. Lots going on in Clojure this week! -main :clojureD was recently held online, the talks should be up on YouTube soonish. Nubank raised a staggering $750M last week, on top of a $400M round in January. Nubank plans to use the funding to launch in Mexico and Colombia, launch new products and services, and hire more employees. That still seems like a lot of money, I’m excited to see if…
Notes. Welcome back to The REPL! This is the first newsletter since April 2020. Lots has changed in the world since then for me and almost certainly for you as well. When I last wrote in April 2020, I had been laid off due to the startup I was working for shutting down after failing to raise funding. Since then the world went through COVID and lockdowns, I started a new job at GitHub working on…
Notes. My team and I were laid off today due to the pandemic. If you’re looking for senior engineers (Clojure or otherwise), then talk to Angus Fletcher, Ian Bishop, Cody Canning, or myself. That means I’m now looking for a new remote job. I live in New Zealand but work on Pacific Time to sync up with engineering teams in USA and Canada. I have experience using Clojure and…
-main Congratulations to CircleCI for raising a $100M Series E round this week! Clojurists Together surveyed our members to see what they’re interested in. There’s still time to apply, or to encourage other Clojure developers to apply. I talked with Łukasz Korecki about building with Clojure in a mature startup. Lambda Island talked about the interceptor pattern, aka coffee…
Notes. Welcome back to The REPL, a newsletter about Clojure and ClojureScript. Wolfram Alpha tells me it’s been 7 months and 5 days since the last newsletter. In the meantime quite a few things have happened! I got to go to St. Louis to speak at Strange Loop We tried to sell our house and buy another one, then put it all on hold Clojurists Together has been separating from the SFC into our…
Notes. I have to start this newsletter with a correction. Last time, I said that I thought CircleCI was the Clojure company that had raised the most money. I was wrong, Nubank has raised $820 million dollars, and has a valuation over $10 billion dollars. That makes them one of the most highly valued fintech startups. For context Stripe’s most recent valuation in 2019 put them at $22.5…
Notes. I’m writing this in the airport before leaving to go to Heart of Clojure. I’m really looking forward to meeting more Clojure people, there’s not many of us in New Zealand. I’ll be handing out Clojurists Together stickers, so come say hi! -main ask.clojure.org is a new Q&A site for asking questions about Clojure. It looks like it has a broader scope than questions…
Notes. Falcon (my employer) still has two job openings, a Web Development Engineer (mostly front-end), and a Senior Software Engineer (mostly backend). If you’d like to work in an empathetic, inclusive, fast growing team that uses Clojure, please look at applying. We’re looking to hire people remotely (or in the Bay Area) who can work with a significant overlap in the Pacific time…
Notes. Falcon (my employer) still has two job openings, a Web Development Engineer (mostly front-end), and a Senior Software Engineer (mostly backend). If you’d like to work in an empathetic, inclusive, fast growing team that uses Clojure, please look at applying. We’re looking to hire people remotely (or in the Bay Area) who can work with a significant overlap in the Pacific time…
Notes. Since the last newsletter I’ve been over to America for work, and back home again. Things have been pretty busy with work, travel, family, e.t.c. but life is finally settling down a little bit. While I was in America I got to see a bunch of Clojure folk in San Francisco, New York, and even Chicago after weather stranded me there overnight. It was really great to meet so many people…
Notes. The Falcon Project (my new employer) is looking for a web development engineer with a strong frontend emphasis. We’re looking to hire remote in the US/Pacific timezone (and close by is possible too). One of our core focuses is communicating privacy issues to consumers in a way that lets them make informed choices. A key part of that is to get a diverse set of perspectives as…
Notes. The last few weeks/months have been pretty busy for me. I’ve started a new job, released some libraries and I’m going to the USA for work in a few weeks! I’ll be in San Francisco from 5th-11th May, and in New York 12th-17th May. If you’re going to be in either of those places at the same time and would like to meet up, reply to this email and we can try and arrange a…
-main If you haven’t read Bozhidar’s post on the future of CIDER I’d urge you to do so. I really think the work I’ve done (not to mention the great work others have done) is worth a bit more than this, and I hope that people are going to realize this before I decide to throw in the towel and call it quits. If you use CIDER in your day job, think about supporting the Open…
Notes. I’ve been on holiday the last few weeks at the beach. It’s been nice to feel the sand between my toes and see my kids enjoy swimming in the lagoon. I’ve also got some good features on Deps finished, I’ll write more about them soon. Lots of new releases this week, I suspect many people are taking advantage of the holidays to finish off projects. -main The annual State…
Notes. Happy New Year! If you celebrated Christmas, I hope you had a great time. If you didn’t, I hope you had a nice break away from work. -main The biggest news of the last few weeks was that Clojure 1.10 was released. Lots of cool stuff here, and as always, a smooth upgrade path. Yehonathan Sharvit welcomes Clojure 1.10 Over the last few weeks I’ve put The REPL’s entire back…
Notes. There’s been a lot going on in the Clojure community in the last few weeks. There was another sprawling discussion about community involvement in the development of the Clojure language, and then the Conj came afterwards with a bunch of great talks. I want to give a special mention to Alex Miller and whoever else was involved with getting the talks up on YouTube so quickly. I…
Notes. I’m not an American, but I do appreciate the opportunity one day a year (at least!) to spend some time thinking about what I’m thankful for. In the sphere of Clojure, this year I’m thankful for: All of the Clojure community and core team continuing to build a great ecosystem and language Day8 and Mike Thompson for employing me and funding me to work on…
Notes. Hoo boy. There was quite a commotion this weekend after Stu Halloway’s appearance on the Apropos podcast. A few years ago there was a similar commotion and I wrote this on HN with my perspective. I think it is still accurate today. The thing to realise about Clojure is that it isn’t an open source language like Python. It is a language…
Notes. I’ve been digging up my driveway to turn it into more grass. It’s been fun using heavy machinery to move the dirt around and seeing a tangible result of my work. Often in software, we don’t get that tangibility, and I definitely don’t have sore muscles the next day! -main Apache MXNet 1.3 is out with experimental Clojure bindings Clojurists Together has…
-main Rich Hickey on Datomic Ions at Clojure/nyc This week on The REPL I talked with Mike Fikes about ClojureScript type inference, Graal, and his work on Clojurists Together. Libraries & Books. Kaocha is a new test runner from Lambda Island with a bunch of nice features including test randomization, fail fast, and profiling slow tests. There’s also some nice…
Notes. Thanks to everybody who has subscribed to The REPL podcast so far, the first episode with Michael Drogalis was very well received. I’ve got a bunch of great guests lined up for the coming weeks. -main Next up on The REPL podcast, I talked to Daniel Higginbotham about Specmonstah, Clojure Spec, and his Clojure/Conj talk proposal. People’s favourite…
Notes. The big news this week for me is that I’m launching The REPL podcast! The podcast is a companion to this newsletter where we can go in-depth on some of the technical details behind the Clojure programs and libraries you use every day. The first episode is with Michael Drogalis where we talk about Pyrostore’s recent acquisition by Confluent, the future of stream…
Notes. It’s starting to warm up again in New Zealand. I’ve enjoyed not having frozen toes in the morning. Bring on spring. -main Congratulations to Michael Drogalis and Lucas Bradstreet, on Distributed Masonry (Onyx) being acquired by Confluent. Pyrostore’s infinite Kafka retention was a smart take on a hard problem. Clojurists Together is…
Notes. Another long time between newsletters. Things have been quite busy lately in the Compton household with sick children, sick parents, and lots going on with Clojurists Together. Things seem to be settling back into a smoother rhythm though. -main Stuart Sierra continues his popular Clojure style guide series with Threading with Style DataScript as a Lingua Franca for domain…
Notes. It’s been a busy month or so with travel to family, but The REPL is back this week. -main Datomic has released a new feature: Ions. This is a way to run functions on your Datomic Cloud cluster. I’ve been really excited to follow cljdoc, a new Clojure documentation project Libraries & Books. Zach Tellman talks more about his Elements of Clojure book nREPL has…
-main When to use varargs Clojurists Together April 2018 update is out, with the final updates from clj-http and Figwheel. Both projects have done really great work. Rich Hickey was on the CaSE podcast and talked about some updates coming to Codeq. The devil is in the details with Clojure discusses some issues that arise in larger Clojure codebases, and…
-main Clojurists Together is going to fund CIDER and ClojureScript from May-July. I’m really excited to see the work they can do. clj-http and Figwheel are finishing up at the end of April, and have done really great work. Carin Meier shows how to use Graal with Clojure to be able to call R and Python There’s a roadmap for Scala 3 out now. I always find it…
Notes The first three months of Clojurists Together funding for clj-http and Figwheel are coming to a close, and we’re looking for projects to fund for the next three months. We’ve published survey results on the kinds of projects our memebers are looking to support and a call for proposals. Applications close on 22 April. Please reach out to the libraries and…
Notes This week’s newsletter is a bit late because I’ve been working on getting re-frame-10x 0.3.1 out the door. It’s got some very cool new features, check it out if you use re-frame. -main clojure.org has a new guide on higher order functions Fly over Amsterdam with ClojureScript Ethereum’s Compact Merkle Trie in Clojure (Part I, Part II) I…
-main ClojureScript 1.10.238 is out and the clojurescript.org website has a good rundown of the changes Jacek Schae has started a series on Medium distilling the Clojure style guide A Resilient Git Dependency Algorithm I’ve written up a summary of this years Clojure survey comments with some commentary. This is the third year I’ve done it, so…
-main The State of Clojure 2018 survey results are out now. Worth reading to see where the community is at. Eric Normand on What Clojure Needs to Grow + Reddit discussion Data mining Clojars for Java 9 compatibility issues The logging bear trap Macros, meta, and logging with some clever macrology from Howard Lewis Ship Libraries & Books. Zach Tellman…
-main One-box stream processing with CSP Guildsman Scope Creep Stateless transient flags and some notes on CHAMP hash maps from Christopher Grande Libraries & Books. denisovans is a library that adapts neanderthal to be a core.matrix backend kee-frame - re-frame with batteries included People are worried about Types. ? A new library for coercing from specs Some…
-main Clojurists Together has the February update out. Bruce Hauman and Lee Hinman have been doing some really great work. We’ve also had a bunch of new signups since the post came out which is also great. Mic check from Christophe Grand with what he’s been up to. The Lisp Game Jam is on from 20-30 April 2018 Apropos is a weekly live discussion of…
-main Autochrome’s structural diffs for Clojure source code are very cool. I’ve long wished for something like this. Metosin have recently published Retit, a new router for Clojure and ClojureScript. They’ve written about their motivations for creating it, and integrating it with Ring Using Clojure macros to clean up error handling…
-main Renzo Borgatti has a list of Rich Hickey’s answers to a bunch of commonly asked questions. Reasoning about systems Libraries & Books. Humble Bundle has a deal on a bunch of O’Reilly FP books, including Living Clojure, Clojure Cookbook, and Clojure Programming. People are worried about Types. ? Spec making errors worse in Clojure 1.9 Foundations.…
Notes. Sorry for the less-than-weekly cadence of The REPL lately. Things have been pretty busy at work and home, plus it’s summer in NZ so I’ve been spending as much time at the beach as possible. Things are starting to settle down though, and The REPL should be returning to a more regular rhythm. Thanks for reading! -main The thing I’m personally most excited about this week is…
Notes. Thanks to everyone who sent me info about GraphQL after the last newsletter, it was very helpful! -main The annual Clojure survey is now on. It’s worth your time to fill it out. I’m looking forward to seeing the results this year, and what people are looking for improvements on. Datomic Cloud is now out, and also has a post on HA. The new pricing model opens…
Notes. Welcome back to the first issue of The REPL in 2018. If you took time off, I hope you had a great break away. I’ve got a favour to ask this week. At Day8 we’re evaluating different backend technologies and are taking a hard look at GraphQL. We’re coming from a CQRS mindset, and GraphQL looks like it might be a good fit. I’d be really interested to hear…
-main Clojure 1.9.0 has been released! The Cognitect blog has the announcement, and there are some great release notes on GitHub. Alex Miller has an intriguing comment on HN: “There is more to the generative testing story that has not yet surfaced. We’ve got another whole project related to this that is still a work in progress. Even without that, I think there…
Notes I want to open this email by thanking everyone who has signed up for Clojurists Together. We’ve had a large number of individual developers get on board, as well as several companies. I wanted to especially highlight new company sponsors Centriq (Transduce Member) and JUXT (Filter Member). We really appreciate their support, along with everyone else…
-main This week I was on the Defn podcast talking about Clojurists Together, this newsletter, and Deps. I had a lot of fun recording it. Clojure Design Patterns shows how to take classic design patterns and implement them, mostly with functions. A good gotcha to watch out for with parsing in clj-time. The same issue exists in cljs-time too. Libraries & Books. I…
Notes. The big news for last week, at least from my perspective, was launching Clojurists Together. This is a project designed to support open source Clojure software and keep it sustainable by paying maintainers. We’ve already had quite a few individuals sign up, but not too many companies yet. If you work at a company that uses Clojure, please consider signing your company…
-main A Clojure performance nemesis: reflection. This is a really good overview of reflection in Clojure, how to spot it, and how to fix it. I’ve launched a free and open source service Deps Versions for adding a dependency status badge to your open source Clojure projects. I wrote a bit more about it on the Deps blog. State in re-frame Cats and Dogs with Cortex…
Notes. Hi folks, I have two exciting announcements this week. First, I’m sending Christmas cards to readers of The REPL. This is a custom design by my wife, so you can only get it from me, this one time. If you’d like one, fill out your details. I’m only sending 80 cards, so get in quick if you’d like one. Second, I’ve been working on Deps, a private Maven…