I’ve been at this manager thing for a while and it’s hard. Hard but rewarding. I’ve built some high performing teams and without a doubt a key factor in my success has been 1-on-1s. When I keep to them diligently the team goes from strength to strength, and so do I. When I deprioritise them…yip you guessed it, bad things happen.

Circa 2016 I started my journey into the land of experience design. The journey from frontend dev to design director has been one heck of adventure. I’ve been extremely lucky to have had some excellent mentors, managers, and sponsors along the way. This post is not about them, but rather the books that accompanied me along the way.

I primarily use heroku to run my applications and Travis for CI/CD. I’m also currently giving Github Actions a try. So what do all those have in common? Well, for starters they have generous free tiers, but more importantly they’re not in the Google Cloud. Google cloud has some really nifty capabilities and so I end up using them pretty often. That’s where my problem started.

There was a time where I was working exclusively in clojure and using SSR for the frontend. It was a peaceful time. But alas peace doesn’t last for ever. And then I picked up a new full stack project. A project building a SPA.

Don’t you just hate functions with names that you can’t pronounce. I mean how do you pronounce -> ? On top of that, its name is not consistent across languages so learning it once is not a guarantee that you’ll know its name in another programming language.

Oh no, it happened again
it’s time to filter or keep
you ponder for hours it’s so
you don’t know which way to go

You’ve discovered the Luminus framework. You’ve reached unparalleled levels of productivity. You can build a web app at the drop of a hat. You can’t believe no-one told you about this before. You’re life is perfect except for one small thing.

Oh, you think JSON is your ally? I do a lot work with JSON. So much so that my favourite library is a JSON parsing library (cheshire). The most tedious thing about working wiht JSON is pulling keys out of JSON objects over and over again.

In my travels I have collected a set of clojure libraries that I can rely on to help me solve problems effectively. These are my top 5.

There was a time where I was so fed up with lisps, Clojure, stack traces, and EOF errors. I was ready to go back to Node.js. And then I came a turning point. I stumbled across episode 29 of the Functional Geekery.

Greetings friend. Today we’re going to talk Clojure tools. And no, you don’t have to use emacs. There are many tools and they’re all slightly different. Which tools are the best? Well, you see, like everything else in programming, it depends. It depends on many things. And therein lies the difficulty. Since our aim is to make it easier for people to enter the Clojure community we’re going to evaluate our decisions on beginner friendliness.

A few days ago @plexus (civilian name: Arne Brasseur) shared a pretty cool idea on twitter: Write a blog post every day from the 1st of December to the 24th of December on somethings to do with Clojure. And so the “Advent of Parens” was born!

In my earlier years, I worked with startups as well as the “idea guys” aka “Code this for me and I’ll give you equity in my idea”. So I quickly learnt to contain costs for each of the multiple ventures I was involved in.

Clojure Bits: bite-sized and human friendly bits of Clojure. Today, let’s chat about JSON, the backbone of the internet. I’ve written a ton of web applications in Clojure and so far my favourite library for working with JSON is Cheshire. It’s simple to use and fast. Really fast. Here’s how you can get started with it.