Holy Dev Newsletter September 2024

I have been to Heart of Clojure in Belgium, which was a wonderful experience. And I am not saying that only thanks to the home-made waffles. And the pralines. A cozy city, good food, very nice people from all around (primarily) Europe. Surprisingly many expats like me :-). Some talks and workshops I really enjoyed as well. Though the best part was meeting and chatting with people new and old that I meet rarely or never before in the real life, such as a gang from Czech Republic, Lovro, Ben, Sigmund, Sami, Colin, and too many others to name. I’ve also had a very nice lunch with my tai-chi chuan teacher. Of the talks I’ve seen or heard of, I can recommend the following: James Reeve’s Living With Legacy Code, XTDB’s Richer SQL — Steering SQL’s Future Towards Clojure’s Philosophy. Sami’s Sailing with Scicloj: A Bayesian Adventure demonstrates well the maturity and power of the SciCloj ecosystem for scientific computing. I hear that Staring into the PLFZABYSS - From the IBM AS/400 to Clojure & Datomic was very insightful. Personally, I found Klor: Choreographic programming in Clojure quite interesting, both w.r.t. the topic and for seeing theoretical research put into a PoC, though it won’t be practical in any near future. Lu’s What it means to be open is non-technical, but inspiring talk about, essentially, being a decent human being towards others, and about going out with your imperfect work.

All my remaining time has been consumed by writing and improving documentation of Wolframite, our Clojure - Wolfram bridge. Both me and Thomas have done a great job and it is turning out to be one of the best documented Clojure libraries. Which is necessary, since we are introducing a wholly new thing to two very different audiences - Wolfram to Clojurians and Clojure to scientists. You can see for yourself our work in progress. After I finish my current review, I will get back to writing a demo of using Wolfram(ite) to analyze bike trips for Clojurians - writing it is a great way to finally learn Wolfram 😅 and to discover more ways to improve the library. I hope to wrap the documentation up in a few weeks, and then we can focus on preparing some talks and workshops we want to have ready when we announce v1. We also are looking for beta testers, either from the Clojure or scientific communities - if you know anyone, let me know!

I haven’t had any time for Fulcro or Rama in the last months, but I am looking forward to coming back to both of them…​

N/A. I was too busy writing to read :-). Check out the gems from August or come back in September.

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Thank you for reading!