Chas Emerick's Blog, page 2

Buy a signed copy of ‘Clojure Programming’, help the EFF!

Through a strange set of circumstances, I recently came into a decent-sized cache of copies of Clojure Programming (which I co-authored, in case the blatant self-promotion to the right didn’t tip you off already). The only other likely option for them was to lay disused for some years, and then end up in the bin; so, I bought them (at a steep discount) from the prior owner, not quite knowing what I’d do with them.

If I didn’t live in the hinterlands, I’d just drop them off at the nearest gath...

Results of the 2013 State of Clojure & ClojureScript survey

Two weeks ago, I opened up this year’s Clojure & ClojureScript survey. Now, you get to see what everyone said, and we all get to speculate on what it means.

First, some process details:

The survey was open for ~7 days, from Nov. 5th – Nov. 12th.
I announced the survey here, on my personal Twitter feed, and via a total of four messages to the main Clojure & ClojureScript mailing lists.
1,061 responses were received.

One immediately-surprising thing is that fewer people participated than last year;...

2013 State of Clojure & ClojureScript Survey

This is the fourth year in which I’ve offered up a “State of Clojure” survey. As before, my intention is to get a sense for the size and overall level of activity in the Clojure community, and to capture a certain zeitgeist of the community’s mood, practices, concerns, and so on. If you’re interested in history, you can see the results of all prior surveys:

2010
2011
2012

The big change this year is that questions related to ClojureScript are included such that it roughly shares the limelight w...

My Mom has Multiple Sclerosis

She’s likely had it since at least ~1983; the first sign was a temporary bout of optic neuritis that left her half-blind for a month or so. All was well for years, until 1996: we were walking out of the DMV — we went so I could get my driver’s permit — and she suddenly stopped walking in the parking lot…and couldn’t move any further. After a minute or two of my asking what was wrong, and her looking a bit panicked and not knowing what to do, her legs started working again. Turns out,...

[ANN] @IMHO

I don’t write stupid Twitter apps often…but when I do, they’re really stupid.

— Me, wearing a smoking jacket

I’ve always enjoyed Twitter, but I’ve never built an app of any kind around it, or done anything with Twitter data. Insofar as that’s roughly the modern equivalent of a ‘hello world’ program, I was perhaps lacking in some critical way.

Well, no longer. I, too, have built a Stupid Twitter App™: go check out IMHO (or its companion Twitter handle, @IMHO)!

While Twitter has many roles...

100% time

Perhaps you’ve heard of “20% time”. In many ways, it or something like it are table stakes for many software folk, and perhaps other creative specialists as well; i.e. if a company doesn’t offer something like 20% time, it may have a hard time attracting top talent, and could end up suffering by not profiting from the results of the outside-the-box sorts of ideas and work that emerge from people’s 20% time. Some organizations — Valve comes to mind as the most prominent — even make it pol...

Cargo-culting to success and understanding

In doing my part to further the fortune-cookie bullshit cycle that is Twitter, I tossed out this nugget yesterday:

“Cargo-culting” isn’t always bad. All things being equal, following the lead of smart, thoughtful people can be a good first approximation.

— Chas Emerick (@cemerick) December 19, 2012

Little did I know that it would spur such conversation, debate, DMs, emails, and so on. I was going to expound on the original tweet in eight parts, but thought better of it.

Cargo culting is an act...

Mostly Lazy, back in the saddle

I was stoked to reboot Mostly Lazy by talking yesterday with Chris Houser (a.k.a. Chouser), this time via Skype. It’s good to be back, so go check out the latest episode, maybe follow the @MostlyLazy twitter feed (who knows, it might not suck), and suggest some future topics, questions, etc.

Results of the 2012 State of Clojure survey

A few weeks ago, I opened the 2012 State of Clojure survey. Per usual, I wanted to take the Clojure community’s collective temperature, see where we all came from, what we’re using Clojure for, what weaknesses and problems exist, and hopefully provide some results that would allow everyone to calibrate priorities and such. This was the third such survey I’ve conducted, and it was a little different than prior efforts:

Now that there are a bunch of rapidly-maturing alternative Clojure implement...

PDFTextStream now available free (as in beer)

PDFTextStream v2.6.0 was released today with a variety of small new features and a couple of bugfixes. The bigger change is that PDFTextStream is now available free for use in single-threaded applications.

Because of the realities of the economics around developing and maintaining a product like PDFTextStream, its pricing has often been out of reach of many projects and very small organizations that really need high-quality PDF content extraction functionality. That’s not to say that PDFTextSt...