About a week ago I put up a poll asked questions about what people in the Clojure community valued. In particular, this was a series of questions that said, “We value X over Y”. I was trying to capture the same notion from the agile manifesto where they say that while there is value in [...]

Lots of new resources coming in to promote a St. Louis startup scene. Tying together some threads: Arch Grants is a new program to give $50k grants to create startups in St. Louis! Cool program. Here’s a story about it. Startup Weekend is coming to St. Louis this weekend (Jan 27-29th) – it’s a great [...]

Some musings on previous Strange Loop years and the plan for 2012. Strange Loop 2009 I started Strange Loop in 2009 with the thought that I could put together a local conference and surely I could find (heck probably knew myself) a couple hundred people in St. Louis that would go to a one day [...]

I read @codahale’s “leaked” assessment of Yammer moving some code from Scala back to Java with great interest today. I post about it somewhat hesitantly because it is a private thing that became public but I have lots of thoughts and I need to dump them somewhere. I am going to write this quickly and [...]

I had a great time at Devoxx this week – many thanks to Stephan and crew and whoever is making all this delicious beer here in Belgium. During the end of my Cracking Clojure talk I showed a screencast I did where I progressively build up a solution to Conway’s Life in Clojure. The end [...]

There was an interesting conversation today on #clojure about various aspects of Clojure documentation. This is not a new topic I thought I’d goose it a little more publicly. There are docs in several places (this is incomplete, but most easily found): clojure.org – “official”, first-stop, very small editor set dev.clojure Confluence – wiki, editable [...]

I’ve been working on understanding thoroughly how RDF datasets used in SPARQL 1.1 are defined and how named graphs and GRAPH graph patterns are evaluated. I have based this write-up solely on the SPARQL 1.1 specification (mostly section 13) and intentionally not on how existing SPARQL engines or stores actually work. Datasets When evaluating a [...]

I taught the second week in my Processing class for kids this week. Last week we focused on learning the x-y coordinate system, drawing simple shapes (ellipse, rectangles, triangles) and colors. This week I wanted to cover the basics for how users can interact with Processing. We started with a simple circle and I talked [...]

It is with great pleasure that I am announcing a new west coast Clojure conference: Clojure/West (@ClojureWest). The announcement is here. The first Clojure/West will occur March 16-17th in downtown San Jose, CA. Future years may occur in San Francisco or other west coast cities with robust Clojure communities (Seattle, Portland, San Diego, and LA [...]

As I mentioned on a prior post, I started teaching a processing class to kids this past Sunday (at our local Ethical Society Sunday School). I wound up getting more kids than expected, I think about 14, between 2nd and 6th grade (and my youngest who’s a kindergartner tagged along). 4 girls, rest boys. I [...]

There were many great talks at Strange Loop but perhaps the one that hit closest to my heart was Sarah Allen’s talk, “Teaching Code Literacy”. I’ve got 3 kids (5, 7, and 8) and they are about the age I was when I started programming (Logo and Basic). Kids growing up today are surrounded by [...]

Occasionally someone emails me to ask advice on planning a conference and I am happy to oblige. I got a particularly good set of questions this week and took some time writing detailed answers so I thought I would post them here in case they’re useful to someone. Lead Time: How much lead time do [...]

There was a request on a HN comment for more info about “real world Clojure” so I turned what started as a comment and got long into a post about our experiences at Revelytix… We started using Clojure at the beginning of 2010 building a new set of enterprise data integration and analytics products at [...]

I’m looking at the Spring 2012 conference season and have compiled the following list of big or regional software / software biz conferences. What am I missing? I know that JSConf is undecided yet but is probably late April. Date Conference Location Jan 11-13 CodeMash Sandusky, OH Jan 24-25 Node Summit San Francisco, CA Feb [...]

Clojure is a sequence processing language – sequences are the core abstraction between data and function. I have come to the notion that code that handles 1 or N of something is far more likely to be correct than code that handles 2 (or any fixed number > 1). In general, any time you use [...]