My digital tools and routines (2024)
My computer is my wizard’s stuff, the thing that allows me to do my magic. What is my set up, what tools do I use for daily productivity, and how do I keep it safe from a disaster?
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Hands on Rama, day 3: Foreign keys and data integrity, macros, queries
The adventure with Rama continues! In the previous installment, I have created a simple C(R)UD for "components". Today, we will spice it up and add a foreign key and data integrity maintenance. Namely, a component can have a parent, which can also have a parent, etc.
I learn about transactional updates, about writing query topologies, and about code reuse with Rama segmacros. As usually, I excel at running into problems we can all learn from 😅.
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Rama: How to achieve a transactional update across partitions
While implementing my pet project on the mind-bending Rama platform, I ran into the classical need for an atomic update of a set of states, possibly at different partitions / machines. Let’s see what are our options for implementing that.
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Hands on Rama, day 2: Rewrite CAS, finish basic C(R)UD
My adventures with Rama continue from day 1. In the second day, I rewrote the compare-and-set logic to atomically succeed only if all field edits were ok (instead of on per-field basis), and I finished my basic, idempotent C(R)UD, with full test coverage. I have re-learned that no special forms may be used in dataflow code. Instead, I may write top-level functions or create anonymous rama fns via <<ramafn
. I have also been reminded that code called from dataflow must not throw exceptions.
I actually took a long break between my first and second day of coding, because the first one taught me that I really needed to understand Rama in much more detail. So I have read essentially the whole Java-focused docs, as well as Clojure ns docstrings, especially those for paths. Since I am me, I forgot a lot and will need to re-read it, but anyway writing Rama is now much simpler.
Overall, it was pretty smooth sailing, even though I had some rough spots, as you can read below.
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My year 2023 in review
This has been a good year: I have been to my first (and likely last) Conj, where I met a couple of my Clojure heroes and old and new friends. I have finally held my "Why Fulcro, and how to learn it efficiently" talk at London Clojurians. After some 9 months, I have finished and fully "productionalized" my tiny ERP, powered by Fulcro RAD and (nowadays) Datomic. RedPlanetLabs have released its "100x productivity backend programming platform," and I am exploring it. Better late than never, I have started bringing the mind-bending Wolfram to Clojurians via Wolframite.
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Hands on Rama, day 1: Setup, idempotent create & update
This is a part of a series documenting my experience applying the Rama programming platform to reimplement a part of the SaaS Ardoq, as a learning exercise. In day 1, I get set up and implement idempotent create and update of Components, while struggling with a few issues and lack of knowledge.
Introduction
I want to learn the amazing programming platform Rama by applying it to a problem I know well: Ardoq. Ardoq is a SaaS tool for enterprise architects and others, to map and model the resources, processes, assets, and strategy in an organization. The heart of Ardoq is a property multi-graph: a directed graph with multiple directed edges between nodes, and with an arbitrary bag of properties attached to nodes and edges.
There is of course no way to rewrite Ardoq in Rama in one person in a few days. Instead, I want to explore two things: (1) How can I model, store, and manage our core data in Rama instead of a relational database? (2) How does Rama make a few selected features simpler/harder to write?
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