May 14, 2014
This post is a follow-up/supplement to my article
Anatomy of a Web App: How I Built RedditLater in Clojure,
published on sitepoint.
To make the article appealing
for a mass-market audience, I had to take out most of the nitty-gritty details
that wouldn’t interest people who weren’t interested in Clojure to begin with (plebians!).
The details still have some good stuff in them, though, so I’ve made this post out of it.
So I hope you’re here to read about my fiddly minutae, because off we go!
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April 6, 2014
I often see arguments about whether or not using coffeescript is a good idea.
Arguments against usually center around whether it’s a barrier for contributions, or
whether it’s an unnecessary abstraction over another language that the developer needs
to know anyhow.
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March 20, 2014
I’ve recently done some work with Elasticsearch. It’s a great platform, but
I still found it pretty hard to get started. It wasn’t obvious what was what.
Perhaps I didn’t read the docs closely enough. Anyhow, I wrote up some examples
demonstrating how to get started with Elasticsearch.
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February 20, 2014
Flask isn’t new, but it’s really great, and it’s
definitely my first choice when starting a new Python app. Today I want to
give you a quick tour of the tools I use to set up a new Flask app.
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January 19, 2014
Recently, I’ve seen popular articles on macros and metaprogramming in Nimrod and Elixir. Both of these are wonderful metaprogramming systems, to be sure, but I couldn’t help but imagine some in the audience smirking inwardly – and occasionally less inwardly. What odd syntax! How out-of-place they are! If only there existed a homiconic language, they think sarcastically, that could eliminate the need for awkward and forced syntax.
Of course, these smug bastards are users of any of the LISP family of languages.
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December 6, 2013
Clojure, being the extensible, malleable, rewritable language that it is, is spoiled
for choice when it comes to making your cores work for you. You can pick your
poison when it comes to making your program concurrent.
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November 16, 2013
For those of you that aren’t familiar, Angular.js is one of a new breed
of emerging frameworks dedicated to building rich, responsive in-browser
interfaces. I’ve had the privilege of working with both Ember.js
and Angular.js, and enjoyed them both, so this won’t be a showdown
(if that’s what you came for, here’s a nice one).
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November 7, 2013
Disclaimer: I have no background in cryptography, despite
writing occasional
ramblings on the subject. I just
know what I’ve picked up along the way, of which precious little
is made available to people who don’t go searching for it.
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October 8, 2013
Disclaimer: Do I even need a disclaimer? Chill out dudes, don’t get all bent.
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September 29, 2013
Ambrose Bonnaire-Sergeant’s core.typed library
has been receiving a lot
of attention
lately. In fact, Ambrose has just raised a well-deserved $20,000 to continue his work
on the library.
Read more »
September 10, 2013
The NSA, besides playing the role of Big Brother in the unfolding dystopian saga revealed by Snowden’s leaks, is at the forefront of cryptography research. Being in the business of secrecy, the NSA also has recommendations for keeping things secret.
The first of these, Suite A is naturally a secret, and apparently recommends a mysterious list of algorithms known only to the NSA. However, their Suite B recommendation for general national security use is published as an RFC, and suggests technologies available today in browsers and web servers.
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August 30, 2013
I just discovered the Github Archive, a dataset of Github events queryable
using Google BigQuery. What fun! So I decided to count how many
repositories have been created this year by language.
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August 21, 2013
RedditLater.com is a little app I made last April. It worked fine until sometime in July, when Reddit released an improvement to its SSL configuration on its api. Thereafter, attempts to get an access token using clj-http-lite began to fail with a javax.net.ssl.SSLException: Could not generate DH keypair exception.
Some investigation led me to a stackoverflow post (where else) which led me to this eventual workaround: hack up clj-http-lite to wrap the default SSLSocketFactory in a new class that would remove all the unsupported algorithms from the list of supported ones.
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August 6, 2013
On the eve of learnxinyminutes.com getting TechCrunch’d, I thought I’d write about a few of my favorite languages on the site.
Learn X in Y minutes has a lot of conventional blockbusters like C and Java now, as well as old cult favorites like Haskell and Erlang, but it was the independent films — that is, languages — that received some of the earliest attention, occasionally by their creators themselves. Being the language-dabbler/compulsive HN reader that I am, I had already heard of them, but in case you haven’t, here are three cool new languages that you can stuff in your brain hole:
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July 11, 2013
Sooner or later, in the field of Web Development, you’re going to need to store someone’s password. This is easy to get wrong, but easy to get right, too. Today, let’s take a tour of the wrong ways, and then find out how to do it the (current) right way.
Plaintext Alice just learned PHP, and are making an app with user authentication. Her database stores an email and password in a table called users.
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July 10, 2013
Live development is nothing new; it’s been well-explored in Lisps and in other languages like Smalltalk and Erlang since more or less the dawn of man. Emacs was for a long time – and by many still is – considered the only way to develop for Lisp, thanks to SLIME.
But I with projects such as Light Table, and a growing popularity of functional and dynamic languages in general, I think we’ll see live coding become seriously popular as capable mainstream tools collide with capable mainstream languages.
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July 7, 2013
Last year, Clojure introduced a new library called core.reducers, which
represented a new, efficient way to deal with operations across collections
in functional languages. It’s since been picked up by Elixir, and libraries
have been written for some other languages.
Today, I want to explain a bit about what reducers are, why they exist,
and how they can be more efficient than other functional methods of handling
collections, and help you write your code more prettier.
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June 28, 2013
Learn the language of strong, independent women and hairy-chested manly men alike: I’ve written a quick C overview for LearnXinYMinutes.com.
Y probably is not 15 in this case, but if you feel like brushing up, head on over to http://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/c/ and learn you some real programmin’. I’m not sure how applicable the format is to a language with as many tricks up its sleeve as C has, but feel free to tell me what you think!
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June 26, 2013
Short version: Go to http://learnxinyminutes.com/
After I posted Learn Clojure in 15 minutes, perhaps yesterday,
itself a knockoff of Tyler Neylon’s Learn Lua in 15 minutes,
I had a little twitter brainstorming session with
Tyler and @emarref. Therein, I was inspired/encouraged to generalize the concept of
inline tutorials-as-code language primers in a community-editable site.
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June 24, 2013
Moving on from pointless flamebait rants,
here’s something a bit more constructive.
Inspired by Tyler Neylon’s excellent Learn Lua in 15 minutes,
I humbly present my original effort at an equivalent for Clojure
(also available as a gist).
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