I have long dreamt about having interactive code snippets of Fulcro in my teaching materials. Showing people code they could modify and see it render right next to it. Fulcro is a ClojureScript library, but it uses some heavy macros - and those typically require JVM Clojure. Well, not anymore. I was able to rewrite them into Borkdude’s Small Clojure Interpreter (SCI) dialect of Clojure. I.e. I can ask SCI to evaluate a piece of code with these macros, which SCI will macro-expand into more cljs, and execute. With SCI, my Fulcro sci.configs, CodeMirror, and Nextjournal’s clojure-mode, I can have a beautiful in-page editor with code evaluation. And I will show you how to do the same, for your blog.

How to turn a service account’s service.json into an access token you can actually use to call Google APIs, when you don’t want to use Google’s SDK? With Buddy’s JWT it is pretty simple, and Tim Pratley’s HappyGAPI will show us how to do it. (I believe that the same approach would work with other OAuth providers, just with changes to some of the values.)

Fulcro is great for writing non-trivial, full-stack business SPA web applications, which display and modify data from a general data store. But it can’t possibly be perfect for every kind of web app. So when is it less then a perfect fit? Possibly still usable, but not as beneficial?

It doesn’t matter how good you are at making software, if you are building the wrong thing. Melissa Perri’s Escaping the Build Trap is an excellent book about fostering culture focused on customer’s problems and producing value. A way too common pitfall is focusing on building features, based on vague, unverified ideas of what customers need or want. (This is the build trap, a.k.a. feature factory trap.) But, as the books says, we should love the problem, not the solution. And we need to assume that we don’t know perfectly what the customers need. I would add, that we can surely build tons of useful features - but the hard question is, which time & effort investments are the most valuable ones, and where the cost of writing and maintaining the code and the consequential increase in complexity are not worth it. Remember, every line of code is a liability.

I have already been pretty much of this mindset (after all, I have read and appreciated The Lean Startup years ago), but still I learned useful things, and remembered others. Some highlights follow. They are rather personal, for a more objective and thorough overview, I highly recommend Julia Park’s 11 Key Learnings from this book.

Fulcro has great dev tooling in Fulcro Inspect, however the part for exploring Pathom resolvers and attributes - its Index Explorer - is not compatible with Pathom 3. Here we learn what to do about it.

A language suit for purpose enables us to express our thoughts clearly and concisely. In programming, this language consists of our actual programming language, the libraries we use, and the abstractions we build. I believe that most of the incidental complexity in code stems from an unsuitable language. A misfit language forces you to speak in a lengthy and roundabout way, never quite getting at what you actually want to say.

Imagine you lacked the word "snow" and had to always say "white, fluffy, crystalline, frozen water". Now imagine you are writing instructions for waxing of cross-country skiis and you lack the words for snow, skiis, and the different kinds and states of snow. How verbose and incredibly hard to understand that would be! And this is exactly how most of our code looks. As Alan Kay puts it: "Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves." [Kay] Let’s explore this idea further.

2022 has been a busy year both geopolitically ❤️🇺🇦 and locally. I have done a ton of Fulcro, played with Rust, got into managing projects and people.

This is my first whole year in Ardoq and I am still loving it. I came to fullfil my dream of being full-time Clojure developer and (aside of that, because I still love Clojure!) I am staying for the friendly, open "big family" culture and awesome people. I started the year by working on our slow, stepwise transition from Mongo to Postgres (I still might one day write about why we sadly did not pick Datomic in the end 😭). It was an important and exciting task. As changing the DB your business is built on, while everything keeps running, always is. Later I took over one of our teams, helping it deliver faster, smaller, more frequently. I have also been pulled into hiring and people management, which is not as much fun as Clojure but is far more important. I still have a great deal to learn here.