Sep 22, 2018Rock TumblingMy son, Jacob, has always been a rock hound, and for his birthday we got a very nice rock tumbler, a Lortone QT66. I have never been too interested in rocks but found myself in charge of our inaugural tumble. Rock tumbling takes time — we chose a basic timeline…Rock Tumbling2 min readRock Tumbling2 min read
Mar 30, 2018Introducing SchematicOur team at Walmart runs a lot of Clojure code. We run a fair number of continuously running services, alongside a smaller number of batch jobs. We have QA environments and multiple production clusters. …Clojure5 min readClojure5 min read
Mar 16, 2018Macros, Meta, and LoggingThrough my years stewarding Apache Tapestry, I always had an emphasis on descriptive exception and logging messages. …Programming6 min readProgramming6 min read
May 30, 2017Confessions of a threading macro addictSince the very beginning of my work in Clojure, I’ve been a fan of the threading macros: ->, ->>, and related. For me, they are essential tools. For example, consider this code snippet: (map #(assoc % :full-name (str (:first-name %) " " (:last-name %))) (sort-by :last-name (filter #(= "97204" (:zip…Clojure4 min readClojure4 min read
May 15, 2017Dear flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, tin-foil hat types, climate deniers, young earthers, and the rest.Dear flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, tin-foil hat types, climate deniers, young earthers, and the rest. Here it is in simple terms: Science is like a crossword puzzle. Maybe you think you have have a better answer to 5 down: “k9 speeder” than “greyhound”. Maybe it’s even the right number of letters to…Science3 min readScience3 min read
Dec 2, 2016Tips and Tricks for ComponentI was really lucky in the way I got started coding Clojure full time; at Aviso I was given a new project and a completely clean slate: I started coding from nothing. This gave me a chance to set up an environment I could really be productive in, one that…Clojure5 min readClojure5 min read
Oct 28, 2016BootYou know, Clojure just doesn’t get used for scripting as often as it should. And that’s a shame. Clojure is concise, readable, and eminently useful: excellent qualifications for any scripting language. Common operations in the scripting domain, such as reading and writing files, or performing HTTP requests, are a snap…Programming7 min readProgramming7 min read
May 6, 2016Some observations about Clojure core.asyncI’ve been using core.async for over three years now and I’ve continued to have insights into how to use it best, as well as some challenges. Challenges When things go well with core.async, they go very well. However, when things go wrong … First off, when a failure occurs in a…Clojure4 min readClojure4 min read
Apr 6, 2016Radian 2: First ImpressionsI’ve been eagerly awaiting my Radian 2 for months now, and it arrived last night. The Radian is a device to pan a camera and manage a time-lapse capture. It’s very clever and very specialized and immediately ups the visual interest level of your time-lapses. I’ve only had a brief…Time Lapse2 min readTime Lapse2 min read
Jun 24, 2015Microservices, Configuration, and ClojureThere have been minor changes to the io.aviso/config library (still in alpha, eh?) since this was originally published. The naming of files has changed, the use of a prefix has been removed, the idea of variants has been introduced, and components can now be configured with just their slice of…Clojure7 min readClojure7 min read
