PurelyFunctional.tv Newsletter 236: Contrarians, Software, Side Projects
Issue 236 - July 31, 2017
Hi Clojuristas,
I am working on a secret project that I oh so want to tell you about but I'll have to wait just a little bit longer. 🤐
Please enjoy the issue.
Rock on!
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Building Re-frame Components
My first Re-frame course is essentially finished. It has been in pre-release for a few months and the launch will happen soon.
Just in case you missed it, the last lesson I recorded was a Tag Editor which was asked for by a member. It lets you type to add tags and remove them, using the Re-frame database.
Another requested feature was to have a way to run the live coding locally. There has always been a live coding editor in the browser on the lesson pages. But now there's a GitHub repo you can run locally and re-compile your code with Figwheel. You can clone the repo yourself or download it as part of the course zip file.
And as part of the material I'm creating around the course, I've written some guides:
Clojure Concurrency
I've also started recording some lessons about Clojure concurrency. There are more coming.
The Hard Thing About Software Development
I can't agree more with this article, but I'd like to add a little bit to it. As programmers, we don't dive in and learn about our domain enough. Our value as programmers is that we can systematize business knowledge. We need to have that knowledge in our heads so that we can turn it into a system. It's really hard to do that by doing one User Story at a time. It is impossible to do piecemeal. We need to immerse ourselves in the domain, become fluent in it, and birth the core abstraction whole.
RimWorld: Contrarian, Ridiculous, and Impossible Game Design Methods
I like contrarian thinking because I collect perspectives. This talk is about the design processes behind RimWorld, how the designers chose which features to prioritize, and how having a strong perspective helps shave off difficult problems. I've been thinking a lot about the wholeness of experiences and how easy it is to have a vision and do things halfway by default.
The dark side impacts of IT on society YouTube
A classic talk from 1997 by Bruce Sterling, another excellent purveyor of contrarian perspectives. I think he nailed the big idea behind 3D printing way back then.
Mihael Konjevic ClojuTRE 2017 Interview
Mihael Konjevic will be speaking at ClojuTRE about his frontend framework called Keechma.
Nada Amin EuroClojure 2017 Interview
Nada Amin gave the Keynote at EuroClojure. If you missed it like I did, read this interview that gives some background (with links to papers!) and listen to the Cognicast interview.
Creative Side Projects: A How-To Guide
Who doesn't like side projects designed to help us learn new things? Una Kravets gives us good tips for organizing our creative projects to help us learn and finish.
NLP And Clojure in Text Intensive Diligence
Kripa Rajhekhar talks about Natural Language Processing and Clojure. It goes over a bit of history of the field and some practical libraries available now.