The Taiwan Beats Showcase is probably my favorite music event at SXSW, and I make a point to catch it every year.
This year I put together a playlist of songs by all of the performing artists for my friends at the Austin chapter of Taiwanese American Professionals.
Photo of Elephant Gym performing at SXSW 2019
I don’t know why I’m quite so tickled by this, but today I learned
that you can make multi-line git commit messages by passing multiple
-m arguments:
I’ve long thought it was a little funny that Emacs doesn’t provide an easy way to run a shell command on the current file. It turns out it does, but it’s not as obvious as you might expect.
Creating a Docker image isn’t particularly difficult, but I never do it often enough to remember the incantations required. Yesterday I needed a Docker image for running CI jobs on Circle CI. There are some great pre-built images out there, but I couldn’t find the combination of Java 17, Leiningen, and Node that I was looking for. This is a quick guide to how to build your own image with the tools you need.
Earlier this week, after responding to a post on
ClojureVerse, I got curious about re-implementing the basics
of Emacs’s regexp-opt function in Clojure. I thought it would be a
fun little coding exercise so I decided to take a stab at it during a
few spare minutes in my day and was very pleased with the concision
and clarity of the result.
Lately I’ve been dabbling in using commas to control indentation in Clojure. I’m sure this will be a contentious one, but I wanted to put it out there to spur converation.
There’s a loose convention in Clojure of leaving top-level (comment ...)-style comments in source files to give examples of how a
particular piece of code works or to provide a convenient means of
invoking functionality contained in the file. You can even see this
in the source files to Clojure proper.
Even though leaving commented out code can seem a bit messy, it has also saved me a ton of time relearning how to invoke something, so I have somewhat mixed feelings about the practice. But, regardless of the merits of using this in production code, it’s unarguably useful in development, and I use it extensively as I work to test out function invocations with different arguments, and to store little bits of test data.
Frustratingly, this form does not play nicely with CIDER’s C-M-x
(cider-eval-defun-at-point) and C-c M-;
(cider-eval-defun-to-comment) commands, which expect the target form
to be at the top-level of the file. The containing (comment ...)
form means that technically isn’t so, leading me to perpetually
evaluate the wrong form…
When working on CollBox, we have a handful of external services
the app depends on which we need to have running at development time.
I used to run these via Foreman, but somewhere along the way my
Ruby installation seems to have gotten borked (thanks, Catalina?)
and since then I’ve been running the services by hand. I always work
in a tmux session anyway, so I decided it was time to see
what it would look like to launch my window full of dependencies in
tmux from a script.
Last year I tried out making a reading list in January, to keep myself reading at an acceptable pace, and to put a bit more foresight into what I would be reading. This worked out pretty well. Despite finishing a couple of my 2016 books in the first days of 2017, I largely stuck to my schedule, and I finished everything on my list, including a few rather lengthy items. I actually didn’t read a whole lot more than I had listed (to my surprise), which makes me even more confident that this is a good idea, since it sets a minimum reading curriculum.
Again this year, I’ve tried to establish some common themes to allow for comparative reading and amass some knowledge of a field. The stronger themes are decision-making (four books) and creativity (four books), and the remaining four books are loosely centered on self-improvement, though that’s more of a coincidence than a plan.
Last Black Friday I posted to Facebook:
I’m abstaining from buying anything today in protest of excessive consumerism. Make something instead!
And got a rather curious reply from a friend:
I wish I could make things
I mulled that over for quite a while. I struggled to put myself in the commenter’s shoes. It’s wildly foreign to me.
In my head, clearly creation is for everyone. It’s not the domain of some privileged class of individuals—it’s an essential act of being human. Everyone should—and can!—create. But I kept tugging at the thread because of a nagging suspicion that perhaps lots of people feel this way.
