TLDR: I created an interactive chart of editors, see it in action.

Today the news dropped that Jetbrains is cancelling its “new” editor, Fleet. Not that I use the product, but it got me thinking about editors (again). I love editors , specifically ones that I can change and bend to my will, such as Emacs.

In my career I have used many different editors. I started on a Laser VTech 310 in Basic 2.0 and from there I transitioned into the world of Pascal and C/C++ to end up on the JVM with Java and Clojure . During that time I have seen many editors come and go in the work field.

Day 5 of solving The Advent of Code in Clojure .

It was a hectic day, and it is not even over yet. I had multiple trips to the vet while trying to get some work done. To relax a bit I worked on the puzzle of the day. In hindsight I was way too cautious with my solution, but then again, it is to solve a puzzle :D

The first thing to figure out is that a list of numbers is in a collection of ranges. Reading in the file and parsing it to numbers is something that has been done the entire week already, then it is a matter of taking the list of ingredients and mapping over the inventory, filtering out the ones that are not in range.

Day 4 of solving The Advent of Code in Clojure .

The first grid problem of the season! The first part was really suspiciously easy, read in the grid, find all the rolls and look at its 8 neighbors, eliminating it if there are less than 4. The 2nd part was a nice progression on this.

Instead of just saying how many should be eliminated, we do it until there are no eliminations possible. This is highly reminiscent of a Conway Game of Life puzzle. In Clojure this is quite nicely done by reading the grid as a vector, and then ranging over all the coordinates. On each coordinate just take a look at the neighbors and apply the logic. Its pure nature means that the functions are already working in the right way to do this repeatedly.

Day 3 of solving The Advent of Code in Clojure .

The puzzle today has us figuring out the joltage of a bank of batteries. This is a puzzle of the type “largest sequence in a list”. When you start you already know that part 2 will be something that a naive approach will not be able to handle, but I still did part 1 with a naive combination function.

The Clojure combinatorics library will not work here, as it will take a look at the distinct pairs that will be in the list. So in a list of (2 8 2) it will find the unique pair of (2 8), resulting in the integer 28 for the puzzle, but it will fail to see that 82 was also an option.

Day 2 of solving The Advent of Code in Clojure .

The 2nd day had us do some magic with numbers. The quest was to find some silly patterns in the numbers. I chose to use good old regular expressions to do the job, while a colleague of mine chose to use math. Both work really well. The 2nd part of the puzzle is to find repeating patterns, where the 1st only wanted pairs.

Day 1 of solving The Advent of Code in Clojure .

Each year I like to participate in the Advent of Code. This year there will be 12 puzzles to solve due to Eric taking care of himself, good on you!

My language this year is Clojure . My solution is quite simple and straightforward. I read the data using split-instructions, transforming the L into a subtraction. For part 1 it is enough to then take the reductions and then filter out all the times we land on the digit 0.

I was under the impression that I was a good typist, but getting an ergonomic keyboard taught me otherwise.

I have long been fascinated by the world of keyboards. I have several mechanical keyboards, most from Ducky. They are wonderful, but they all have in common that they are traditional keyboards. This means that your hands are close together on the keyboard, closing your chest and forcing your hands in an awkward position. We all have become very used to this position, as this is the way typewriters taught us all how to type.

When I tell people that I like to code in Clojure the common response is “wut?”. Clojure is not known as a programming language in which you create big systems. As all Clojure people know, this is not true. There are many systems written in Clojure. Let me show you some that are very actively maintained.

First there is Lipas, a Finnish platform that shows you information about sports clubs. The structure and techniques used in this code base I use as a reference implementation for my own ClojureScript + Clojure systems. A screenshot of the application is shown here:

Observability in cloud-native applications is crucial for managing complex systems and ensuring reliability (Chakraborty & Kundan, 2021; Kosińska et al., 2023). It enables continuous generation of actionable insights based on system signals, helping teams deliver excellent customer experiences despite underlying complexities (Hausenblas, 2023; Chakraborty & Kundan, 2021). In essence, adding proper observability to your system allows you to find and diagnose issues without having to dig through tons of unstructured log files.

While following the book Zero2Prod you will learn how to deploy a Rust application to digital ocean through a Continuous Deployment pipeline. This is hardly anything new for me, I even teach a course in DevOps, but to not stray from the path of the book I followed its instructions.

In July 2023, I installed NixOS as my daily operating system. NixOS is a Linux distribution that emphasizes a declarative approach to system management. This means you define your desired operating system configuration in a file (e.g., KDE with Emacs 30 and Firefox), and the Nix package manager uses that file to create your OS. Every change generates a new version, allowing you to revert to a previous version if anything goes wrong.

In my previous post I highlighted that I set myself the goal of creating a self hosted comic book collection tool. Before that, in a post about tooling , I reiterated my ❤️ for Clojure as a language. So, this is the start of a series of articles detailing how the development is going, and also as an introduction to the various parts of the tech stack.

Clojure is special to me in that there are hardly any big frameworks in the ecosystem. Clojure is more like Lego, there are countless building blocks of various shapes and sizes. It is up to you as the developer to stick the blocks together to get something usefull. You might guess that I also ❤️ Lego.