synthc

I'm working from home now, but it gets lonely sometimes and for some discussions face to face contact is just better.

I'd love to work in an office if I had my own room, or share one with a few team members at most, but nearly all jobs have open offices with tons of distractions. My last office had 12 employees in a room designed for 6: it was draining my energy and cut my productivity in half.

I'd work in an office if it was actually a place conductive to work, but I'm never working in an open office again.

For Clojure there are libraries to refresh the program: these stop the app, reload and evaluate all the source code files, and restart the app to ensure you are working with a consistent state that reflects the source code.

Between such reloads you might end up in inconsistent states, but you benefit from fast iteration:

My workflow is to update functions in the source code, send to to the repl, quickly test them in the repl, and once done, I save, commit and push the code. CI then runs the test suite from the source files.

I think StackOverflow used to be better, but the moderation now is both insanely strict (the question has to be super narrow) and inadequate (tons of duplicate questions)

The most highly rated questions, there are some real nuggets, would just get closed today.

Ola Bini, a Swedish software developer and researcher (known for the Ioke language, involvement with JRuby and his research on security and privacy) was arrested 2 years ago in Equador on flimsy allegations. (earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19652642)

The whole affair seems like a total mess, I just hope justice will be served.

Too bad indeed, StackOverflow is IMO one of the better job boards. I really like the UX: searching by 'tech tags', filtering on location, salary ranges for many postings.

I got a really nice job through it once by searching for niche technologies.

Yeah this was also my experience. I expected a world of hurt when migrating to Bitwarden but it just worked!

The Netherlands also has something like this, contracting for higher rates and some tax advantages. Many 'freelancers' stay at a client for years. I've recently starting working like this, I contacted a recruiter (who takes a percentage of my rate) and had a contract lined up within a week.

Completely off topic: i was watching an interview with Ozzy Osborne on youtube, and one of the comment said "if you watch it at 2x speed it sounds like a normal conversation", and it did!

True, but restarting a service, remounting all the data, waiting until everything has synced etc, just to apply a security patch is a big downside of the immutable approach

This blog posts mixes up infrastrucure as code (a good thing) and immutable infrastructure (a good thing, for some use cases)

Immutable infrastructure is great for stateless services, to ensure you know exactly what versions are used and to avoid people from making changes on the server. For databases and other stateful services, such as message brokers, it's less ideal.

Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is.

SEEKING WORK | Remote

Experienced software developer, specializing in Clojure(script), Optaplanner and performance tuning of JVM applications.

I'm looking for part-time contracts in addition to current assignment, or full-time contracts after May 2022

I'd like something like Clojure, but with static typing and native compilation.

SEEKING WORK | NL or REMOTE

10+ years experience with Clojure(script), Java, Kafka, Optaplanner, DevOps and AWS/GCP/Azure.

See profile for contact details.

SEEKING WORK | Utrecht, NL or REMOTE

Experience:

- 10+ years experience in developing cutting edge software

- MSc in Artificial Intelligence.

- extensive experience in developing, operating and optimizing data platforms

Skills:

- Languages: Clojure(script), Java, Haskell, Bash, Python, Prolog

- AI: OptaPlanner, Natural Language Processing.

- DevOps: Ansible, Terraform, Cloudformation, Prometheus

- Cloud: AWS, GCP

- Databases: Cassandra, Postgres, MySql, Datomic, ElasticSearch

- Streaming: Kafka, Kakfa Streams, Storm, RabbitMQ

- finding and fixing bottlenecks in distributed systems.

Previous projects:

- automatic extraction of data from legal documents

- scheduling software that is aware of labour laws

- extrapolation/interpolation and alerting for IoT sensor data

See profile for contact details.

I recall that when I was in Chiavenna (in the north, bordering Switzerland) there is a valley with a large chestnut forest. Chestnuts used to be a staple in that region.

You can also read up on the ancient roman diet, there are many sources on that.

There are records of pasta being prepared in Italy from back to the first century AD

I also go without restaring the repl for weeks, but there are plenty of situations where you need to restart the repl: adding libraries, servers binding to ports, making sure you have no temporary edits, etc, etc.

The whole 'reloaded workflow' is a workaround to the slow restart IMGO. It works well, but there is a learning curve, especially coming from languages with fast edit-compile-run cycles such as go.

I've also worked with scheme, and having a repl up and running in milliseconds is really nice.

Simple and easy are not mutually exclusive, and simple software is not automatically good software. Other criteria, ease of use, documentation, also matter, especially for a build tool intended to be used by a whole community.

At the moment deps feels more of a 'make your own build tool' kit. Simple, sure, but not easy to use: you need to tell it how to build jars or run tests, which is IMO essential functionality of a build tool.

I don't want to tell my build tool how to achieve these essential things, and risk ending up with a mess of projects that all use different aliases to run different tests runners and different jar building plugins. Build tooling is one place where convention over configuration matters to me, and why I still prefer leiningen.

I'm hoping deps and tools.build will evolve from a 'make your own build tool kit' to a build tool that exposes the kit it was built on, so that most projects don't require anything custom, and be flexible enoug so that one special project can leverage the 'simple orthogonal parts' in the kit.

I see tools.build as a step forwards, but it's not there yet IMO, the user still needs to configure a bunch of stuff to get essential functionality.

I hope the core team will make a build tool on top of the 'make your own build tool kit' that is deps and tools.build, that comes with good defaults and essential features for the common projects, while exposing the 'simple orthogonal parts' in the kit so these can be used for complex projects.

I've tried deps several times, but I keep coming back to leiningen. Can anyone explain the advantage of using deps to me?

What I want from a build tool is: manage dependencies, starting a repl, running tests, and building a jar. Leiningen provides me this: lein repl, lein test, lein uberjar. Simple and exactly what I need, and importantly: i can expect that all leiningen projects use the same commands.

Deps can be made to do all these things, and more, but you need to configure it. Which test runner should I use for tests? Which library should I use to build an uberjar? Since it's all configurable, I risk that every deps project gets it's own special snowflake build setup, and I need to spend time avoiding this.

Until deps gets a standard way for building and testing, i'm sticking to leiningen.

i'll watch this later

it's very useful: prank your colleagues with the occasional fork bomb, steal their ssh keys and delete their files.

because Magit is so much more convenient and user friendly than the CLI?

You don't have to learn all the plugins, I only use magit.

Cider (the clojure plugin for emacs) has a variant that prompts you for the the values for those variables.

I disagree: when fixing a bug I usually start with writing a failing test that reproduces and exposes the problem, and then fix the problem so that the test passes.

Understanding, reproducing and fixing the problem is the hard part, once that is done making a test out it hardly takes any time.

Writing the test does not only prevent regressions, it also helps with confirming you actually fixed the bug.

yes i also prefer it. With Schema, the defined schema's are normal vars, which you can jump to with editor support. With spec i'm always searching for the definitions.

Schema is a good library. Everyone seems to use spec today, but Schema easier to use than spec IMO.

Spec is also still in alpha, with spec2 still under development.

It will take a long time to move from x86. Tons and tons of servers running legacy code compiled for x86 out there.

Magit, an emacs package to control git. It's not pretty, and certainly not conventional, but very efficient and discoverable.

Really? I find using harvest a real chore.