Emacs: Running Shell Commands on the Current File

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.

How to Create a Customized Clojure Docker Image

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.

Regex Optimization in Clojure

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.

Clojure Indentation Commas

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.

Interactively Evaluating Clojure Code in Comments in Emacs

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…

Launching Dev Dependencies with tmux

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.

2017 Reading List

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.

Curation is Creation

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.

In Which I Realize that Naming is Even Harder

I was just lying in bed reading when I had a small realization related to my last post, No, Seriously, It’s Naming¹: my names are wrong–but maybe not how you’d expect.

If you recall, I left things like this:

No, Seriously, It's Naming

I just read David Bryant Copeland’s post It’s not Naming That’s Hard—It’s Types which he wrote in response to Katrina Owen’s What’s in a Name? Anti-Patterns to a Hard Problem and I feel compelled to say a few words. Katrina’s post provides some suggestions around the perennial developer challenge of naming things in code. Along the way she asserts that including the type of a variable in its name is typically an antipattern, and “type information is just not that compelling”–something David took great exception to.

David argues that the actual problem is we don’t have enough types: “types are a better way to solve the problems Katrina identifies in her post.”

He then proceeds to turn Katrina’s perfectly reasonable bit of code…

def anagrams(subject, candidates)
  candidates.each do |candidate|
    subject != candidate && same_alphagram?(subject, candidate)
  end
end

def same_alphagram?(subject, candidate)
  # ... (not provided, but I want to offer a fair comparison of length)
end

…into this…