Choose Your Tools
I ❤️ to build software. I sadly do not have a lot of time next to my daily work to spend on my side projects, so I have to be disciplined in where I invest time. I wish I could spend endless amounts of time on exploring new technologies, but sadly I simply do not have that time. In writing this is sometimes referred to as “to kill your darlings”.
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch wrote in his 1916 book On the Art of Writing: “If you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: ‘Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.’”
Luckily for me, I just finished my latest round of education, so I now do have time to spend on building some of the ideas that have been floating around in my head for the last 3 years. And I did start out writing stuff. Some in Rust
, some in Go and others in Clojure.
Like many programmers I love to explore new languages, I think you always learn something new from them. As Clojure really taught me about functional programming when all I knew was imperative languages. In the end, after having a summer of not working on my studies I have 0 projects completed, but I do have 4 versions of them.
So, I decided to step back and evaluate. I decided to kill my darlings of different programming languages and focus solely on Clojure again. Development in Clojure conforms to Rule 6 for me. While working out the problem I love the interactive build method. I actually like the parentheses, I know… weirdo me 🤗.
update 2025: during the holiday season I got the book Zero 2 Prod, which is a book about making Rust project production worthy. Experience I already have in Java and Clojure. This sparked rule 6 for me for the Rust language again. The experience following the book has been quite smooth, but the real proof is, of course, creating something yourself. I know, I am like a (sidenote: I love puppies!) puppy chasing his tail… Let’s see where this goes.
From reading the book I already see lots of improvement for my Hed tool.
You might even remember that I used to do a live-streaming series in Clojure. I still don’t have a lot of time to continue that one, but who knows… I might drop some videos later again.
Since the summer I have been somewhat involved in Biff, a rapid prototyping web framework in Clojure. It provides a set of sensible defaults to just get started, and it allows you to easily change all its bits. I have been building my latest project on top of it, which, with a bit of luck, might even make it to production.