PurelyFunctional.tv Newsletter 243: Specialization, McLuhan, Lumo

Issue 243 - September 18, 2017

Hi Clojurtaters,

Clojure SYNC update:

I'm filling up the speaker lineup quickly; I'll be announcing more speakers this week on the mailing list, so please sign up.

Thanks to everyone who helped out, the Diversity Statement is much stronger than it was.

Oh, and I forgot to announce the end of the Early Bird ticket price last week. To be fair, I'm extending the $50 discount until Sept 22. Buy tickets, please.

You may have noticed that I have not published new videos in a few weeks. I mentioned a bit ago that I'd be working mostly on improving existing courses for a little bit. Well, I've been doing that. I wanted it to produce more visible output for you, but it has been mostly behind the scenes. Besides the extended notes and complete GitHub repo for the Web Dev in Clojure course, I haven't released anything yet. That gives me some anxiety because I want you to know what's going on.

So what have I been working on? In short, an overhaul of my first-ever Clojure course, Introduction to Clojure. The original course was ~1.5 hours, divided into three videos. I've completely rewritten all of the notes (now 100 pages!), reworked some of the flow of it, and started re-recording it. I've learned a lot about how to make these courses since I made this one over 4 years ago. The material from just the original, first 34-minute lesson is now expanded to over 1.5 hours just by itself! I've been busy getting all of this together. I will be publishing it as it comes out. Look for it this week :)

Finally, I'm speaking at Clojure/conj next month. I need to practice my talk. See you there?

Please enjoy the issue.

Rock on!

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Phrase GitHub

A new library for creating human readable messages from specs specifically used for form validation. It lets you easily pattern match on validation errors to give very specific, context-senstitive error messages for invalid input in a form. Having great validation messages is an important part of form usability.

Specialization vs Collaboration with Aria Stewart Podcast

I've been really down on "Agile" recently and this podcast discussion gave me a new mental model for explaining what I've experienced. So many times, the dev team is compartmentalized or chooses to compartmentalize itself from the rest of the company. They create an API for giving the developers work (ticket tracker) and expect to be treated like a black box. The discussion in this podcast at least points a direction for re-healing the rift.

On Abstraction YouTube

Zach Tellman speaks about two things in this talk. The first is what he's found trying to research the meaning of the word abstraction in software. And the second is the problem with decomplecting everything down to little bits: will they form a cohesive whole? Can the code be flexible to respond to changing demands? I can't wait for him to speak at Clojure SYNC. He's researching his book full-time now.

Build a Better Monster YouTube

I can't resist a Maciej Ceglowski talk. This ones is about the uncontrolled collection of personal data.

Clojure-Flavoured Devops YouTube

Jon Pither presents build tools written in ClojureScript. Mach is a repalcement for Make and Roll wraps Terraform.

Bootstrapping a Standalone ClojureScript Environment YouTube

Antonio Monteiro has created a Node.js-based ClojureScript environment, called Lumo, that you can use to script from the command-line. This talk goes into some of the cool parts of Lumo.

Have Your Cookie and Eat it Too YouTube

Josef Svenningsson explains stream fusion, using Haskell, for Clojurists. Stream fusion lets the compiler optimize away the creation of intermediate lists like when you chain maps and filters together.

The Father Of Mobile Computing Is Not Impressed Fast Company

Brian Merchant interviewed Alan Kay for his book The One Device.

Become --- How I went from selling food in the street to working for top firms in techBecome --- How I went from selling food in the street to working for top firms in tech Medium

Alvaro Videla tells the story of how he learned to code.