Writing = Thinking

Credo: think in public, learn generously, and always remember…

“Writing is nature's way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is.”

— Richard Guindon


All the topics
All the posts
2024-03-13
Halting AI

The current wave of AI tools is incredibly cool. I hope more people get distracted by the incredible coolness and bet on this wave of AI, because I'm betting the other way, on the hot mess of human general intelligence.


2023-10-19
Riff: A "mycelium-clj" for the Clojure ecosystem?

In a world of concrete objects, steel frameworks bring sense and order. In a forest of composable tools, libraries and open-ended schemas, it would be the mycelia. A frustrated yet optimistic man muses "Might such a thing come to be?".


2023-09-07
Emerging from dotemacs bankruptcy the hard way: integrating the IDE (feat. Clojure(Script))

The one in which we design a rich Integrated Development Environment (IDE) experience, using Clojure as our muse. Featuring Language Server Protocol (lsp-mode + clojure-lsp), clojure-mode, cider, and more! Buckle up and get a coffee.


2023-08-02
Emerging from dotemacs bankruptcy the hard way: getting about

We want to maximize our ability to "stay in The Zone". So the aim is to create the fastest, smoothest, tightly integrated, and unobtrusive mechanism to get things done using the keyboard alone.


2023-07-23
Emerging from dotemacs bankruptcy the hard way: the midway refactor

Or the one in which we confront our elisp n00bishness and try to be better at using it. And we learn new habits to understand our Emacs better. Better late than never.


2023-07-06
Emerging from dotemacs bankruptcy the hard way: package management

Elpa, Melpa, git repo. Vendor package straight from source. It compiled? Fetch some more! Elpa, Melpa, git repo. In more adult terms, we learn to use use-package to fetch, install, initialise, configure useful packages that enhance our Emacs experience.


2023-07-04
Emerging from dotemacs bankruptcy the hard way: init begins

The first action must, of course, be to colour the bikeshed and set some decent defaults.


2023-06-29
Emerging from dotemacs bankruptcy the hard way: Prelude

Or, finally biting the bullet to redesigning my developerly and writerly experience, from the ground up, with Emacs.


2023-06-21
What have you been curious about?

Arguably a more interesting, revealing, and kinder question than "What are you curious about?"


2023-06-04
Software demos as deliberate acts of serious play

Making a software demo is a form of deliberate, serious play. An act that feeds our curiosity, inventiveness, and drive. It enlivens. It enriches. It entertains. And as we asymptotically approach the A.G.I. that's just around the corner, the capacity for deliberate, serious play will remain distinctively, deeply, deliciously human. Career software people like yours truly may please take note!


2023-04-07
Cold restart whole system after total outage

"What are folks’ views on systems so large where cold-starting the whole system is almost impossible?"... — M'colleague, Shivam, In A Slackroom Next Door.


2023-02-14
Bad Matrix

A while ago, someone in the Recurse Center nerdiverse decided we needed a "Bad Print". They made one. Things escalated. Bad Matrix happened.


2023-01-19
Riff: Classifying Tools for Thought

Trying out a classification for "Tools for Thought" as a means of augmenting the human intellect, hot on the heels of recent community conversations about ChatGPT, CoPilot, Stable Diffusion etc...


2023-01-16
Animating Text Art in JavaScript

It is with no small thanks to MDN, StackOverflow, Firefox's support for countless open tabs, JavaScript's support for first-class functions, and first-class supportive colleagues, I learned it is possible for a web front end novice to program "text art animations". Whatever that is even. Because I thoroughly enjoyed doing just that for Hanukkah of Data 2022. Here's how it went down.


2022-10-19
A Clojure view of "Mars Rover"

Here I illustrate how Clojurists (including Yours Truly) like to solve problems and model things using hammocks, pure functions, and the "it's just data" ideology. Also, while the *problem* focuses on "design in the small" of application logic, many ideas in the *solution* can—and do—scale all the way to "design in the large" of whole systems.


2022-04-29
Which Clojure codebases should I read? How and why?

Newcomers to Clojure so frequently ask this question that an FAQ/Guide is being discussed, to add to the Clojure website. I struggled a lot with the question too, when starting off in Clojureland. Here are my notes and opinions.


2022-04-27
Shell ain't a bad place to FP: part 2/N: Functions as Unix Tools

Or, the one in which we hand-craft nano Unix tools using Bash functions.


2022-04-19
Why and How I use "Org Mode" for my writing and more

I find myself telling people that they will have to pry org-mode from my cold dead hands. Which befuddles me. Why, as an ingrate software nerd who has soured on software technology — talk about biting the hand that feeds — do I evince such strong sentiment about a software program?!


2022-03-25
n ways to FizzBuzz in Clojure

FizzBuzz is everywhere. Every programmer passes through its rite of passage, or at least bears witness to another. Over the years, many gentlenerds have taken it upon themselves to discover ever new ways to incant those hoary symbols. I hereby enjoin these few drops of Clojure to that roiling ocean of FizzBuzzery.


2022-03-11
Shell ain't a bad place to FP: part 1/N: McIlroy's Pipeline

Or, the one in which we "take apart" Douglas McIlroy's pipeline from 1986. Doing so teaches an object lesson about the essence of modular, composable, functional architecture.


2022-03-08
shite: static sites from shell (part 1/2) — feeling the html.energy

This primer is for people like me, who long dreamed of lovingly hand-crafting our own home on the Internet. We begin our quest by seeing, feeling, and harnessing pure HTML.energy.


2022-02-25
Dismal Arithmetic in Dyalog APL and Clojure

Dismal arithmetic is just like the arithmetic you learned in school, only simpler: there are no carries, when you add digits you just take the largest, and when you multiply digits you take the smallest. How does code look in the two languages I like a lot; Clojure and APL?


2022-02-23
Shell ain't a bad place to FP: part 0/N: Introduction

Or, *Supremely Functional Bash Programming*, an exploration in N parts...


2022-02-22
What makes Functional Programs and Systems "Functional"?

In which we ponder the Functional Nature of Life, The Universe, and Everything. Please feel free to follow through the weeds, or jump straight to the bottom for my 2 nano BTC on the matter. (Or my current state of mind, at any rate.)


2022-02-14
Baby don't hurry, don't stop (feat. Melancholy)

Here lies melancholy that I put to paper from a particularly deep hole, not too long ago. It may ruin your day, or it may make you feel a little bit understood about your dark moments. Your mileage will vary.


2022-02-11
people > culture > values > strategy > technology

Technology is—and ought to be—the /byproduct/ of far more important, powerful, and deep-rooted aspects of organisations — including wholesale societies. The pandemic of technology-solutionism gleefully embraced and amplified by all and sundry makes me believe that people seem to have decided it's the other way around.


2022-02-10
Poor man's Reader App with Pandoc & Bash

Every so often, I want to avoid opening a website in a browser, for ... reasons.


2022-02-03
How To Be a Totally Natural Conference Speaker?

Spurred by a conversation with a whip-smart friend and fellow gentlenerd, who unreasonably believed (believes?) they have nothing worth speaking about at the software conferences we like (IN/Clojure, FunctionalConf, local meetups etc).


2022-01-20
Reframe Technical Debt as Software Debt. Treat it like a AAA-rated CDO.

I've long struggled with the *Technical* Debt metaphor. It was immediately useful when I first heard it. I still think it is useful, albeit as a starting point. The more I worked with software, the more infuriatingly incomplete it started to feel. So I've reframed it as *Software* Debt, for myself. Here's what I'm thinking.


2022-01-20
How To Not Die By A Thousand Cuts. Or, How To Think About Software Quality.

Not a weighty meandering 300 page Zen dialogue on Motorcycle Maintenance. Merely a meandering blog post in which one contemplates /Quality/ of software products.


2021-11-13
Systems, Scale, Value

Creating things is a delicate endeavour, fraught with peril. People struggle forward through crazy marketplace and environmental complexities just to get from one day to the other. Yet I can't shake off the feeling that we make it harder for ourselves than it should be. I've been trying to work out why. There's a lot to unpack. This post is a start at thinking about it in public.


2021-11-10
In the beginning, was the domain name

How this blog came to be is a minor miracle. Long story short, I conned myself into believing nobody will find /and/ read it. But you're here, aren't you? And you're reading this. Aren't You? Confucamus. Well, here's how you got here.