Notes.

The Falcon Project (my new employer) is looking for a web development engineer with a strong frontend emphasis. We’re looking to hire remote in the US/Pacific timezone (and close by is possible too). One of our core focuses is communicating privacy issues to consumers in a way that lets them make informed choices. A key part of that is to get a diverse set of perspectives as we’re building the product. I’m personally really excited about the project and the potential that it has for good.

If you’re interested, you can apply at the link above, or reply to this email if you have any questions about the role.

-main

• Bozhidar has written about The Curious case of Clojure Contrib, with his perspective on Clojure Contrib. Alex Miller then wrote a response: The Completely Ordinary Case of Clojure Contrib. The comments on Reddit also had some good follow-up.

• Those two posts were responding to this discussion around a new doc for clojure.org on Contrib libraries

• I talked with Zach Tellman on The REPL about Elements of Clojure, his work in the Clojure community, the Clojure contribution process, and what’s next for him. I was glad to be able to talk to Zach, though it was a little bittersweet as he’s going to be less involved with Clojure in his new work at Microsoft. Alex Miller also made a comment in response on Reddit to some of the things we discussed.

  If I was to re-record the podcast, I would clarify this comment which understated recent changes:

  It doesn’t seem clear to me that any course corrections [to the way Clojure is developed] are coming either, that there’s going to be any difference, although I should point out Alex Miller’s weekly roundup of what he’s been working on with Clojure … I wouldn’t say nothing has changed

  We’re definitely seeing greater clarity on things like Contrib, more of an insight into Clojure’s development process via Alex’s Inside Clojure blog, and are in the process of documenting more clearly the expectations of contributing to Clojure itself.

• Tickets to Heart of Clojure are now available. This is shaping up to be a really cool event. I was also pleased to see Saskia Lindner and Bozhidar Batsov will be hosting it. I’d also note a stellar array of companies that are sponsoring Heart of Clojure. If you appreciate them sponsoring a community conference like this, consider contacting a couple of them to voice your appreciation.

• Dutch Clojure Days videos are up now. There were also a few recaps of the event from different participants. They were a good read if like me, you couldn’t make it in person.

• Clojure/north was last weekend. The videos aren’t up yet, but the keynote was from Jon Pither of JUXT, talking about Crux. Crux is a new bi-temporal database that lets you query against a valid time a.k.a business time, as well as the transaction time. They have a blog post talking more about bitemporality and showing how to use Crux. Disclosure: I was part of a private preview of Crux before it was released publicly.

• Vouch is a “breakthrough blockchain-based identity and intelligence platform”. I don’t fully understand what that means, but they’ve got a stellar team of Clojurists on board including Ray McDermott, Mike Fikes, and David Nolen and are betting on ClojureScript heavily.

Libraries & Books.

• defns is a library from Дејан Јосифовић, a reader of The REPL. It lets you define functions with inline spec definitions, and use the specs to create pre/post conditions on the function.
• Sean Corfield continues to push forward with next.jdbc. If you’re a heavy user of clojure.java.jdbc, or write a library that uses it, now is the time to give your feedback on the API.
• Of note to Transit users was this change softening the warnings about persisting Transit.
• TechAscent continues to put out high quality libraries in the data science space. In February they announced tech.ml.dataset and tech.ml, but I only got to them recently.
• Jacek Schae has updated his comparison and benchmarks of a bunch of different front-end JS frameworks.

Foundations.

• There was a great discussion at the Mechanical Sympathy mailing list about triggering page faults in one thread ahead of the writing thread. Highly technical, and highly enjoyable.
• Hannah Henderson wrote a widely shared post on her experience of micro-promotions and mentorship at CircleCI.

Tools.

• ohmyclj is a Clojure script running tool.
• The Clojurians Slack Log is not working at the moment, but Exoscale has sponsored credits to help it run, and there are some new people coming on board to help run it too.
• Light Table has some new maintainers, and is working on upgrading from old versions of Electron and ClojureScript.
• Bozhidar has an update on what he’s been working on recently.

Recent Developments.

• Alex Miller talked more about how closed spec checking will work, and Clojure 1.10.1.
• The Defn podcast talked with David Miller, the maintainer of Clojure CLR.

Learning

• Learn about the secret fourth arity in the map transducer + Reddit. Reading this felt a little like stumbling into a secret area in a video game.

Misc.

Around the year 2030, 10 years 252 days and 10 hours away from now, we will be in a position where we set off an irreversible chain reaction beyond human control, that will most likely lead to the end of our civilisation as we know it. That is unless in that time, permanent and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society have taken place, including a reduction of CO2 emissions by at least 50%.

“You did not act in time” - Greta Thunberg

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I’m Daniel Compton. I maintain public Maven repositories at Clojars, private ones at Deps, and help fund OSS Clojure projects (along with tons of generous members like Pitch, JUXT, Metosin, Adgoji, and Funding Circle) at Clojurists Together. If you’ve enjoyed reading this, tell your friends to sign up at therepl.net, or post a link in your company chatroom. If you’ve seen (or published) a blog post, library, or anything else Clojure/JVM related please reply to this to let me know about it.

If you’d like to support the work that I’m doing, consider signing up for a trial of Deps, a private, hosted, Maven Repository service that I run.

Thanks!