It has been quite a while since my last “Meta Reduce” post. I’m pretty disappointed with myself for dropping the ball on “Meta Reduce” so quickly, but given how busy my schedule was the entire summer I think I’ll give myself a pass.

Long story short - the period since my last update was dominated by conferences, travel, lots of work, and pursuing my newfound passion for personal finance management. Now, let’s dive into some of the highlights.

Clojure

CIDER got funded by Clojurists Together and I’ve spent most of my OSS hacking time working on it lately. This resulted in the recent release of CIDER 0.22 and I’m currently pretty close to releasing CIDER 0.23 (a relatively minor update compared to 0.22). My goals for the funding cycle are pretty humble - small improvements here and there, better documentation, and better collaboration with other tool authors. I hope to find the time to expand on this subject in a separate article.

All of the projects in CIDER’s Orchard have been making steady progress the past few months and I feel we’re really close to the release of new nREPL release. The only thing that remains to be done before we can cut nREPL 0.7 is the sideloading support. Once that’s in I’ll focus on CIDER implementing it. This is going to be big!

Ruby

RuboCop got a pretty big release recently and brand new extensions for minitest and rake. I haven’t had much time for RuboCop lately, but I plan to focus on the 1.0 release once I’m done with the Clojurists Together funding cycle for CIDER.

I wrote a bit more about rubocop-minitest here.

By the way, RuboCop 0.74 achieved one nice milestone - it got downloaded over 1,500,000 times which is an all time record for a single RuboCop release!

GitHub Sponsors

I was invited to participate in the beta of GitHub Sponsors. What’s appealing about the service is:

  • Lower fees than Patreon
  • GitHub are matching all donations up to $5k/year for the first year
  • It’s prominently featured within GitHub

So far my early feedback for the service has been positive, as I already have sponsors donating about $250/month. It’s not much in the grand scheme of things, but it’s more than I ever managed to raise via my Patreon account, so that’s encouraging. And thanks to GitHub matching the early donations those $250 got doubled to $500. Let’s see how things are going to play out in the long run, but for now I’m cautiously optimistic.

You can support my OSS work via GitHub Sponsors here.

Conferences

I had a great time at Heart of Clojure (as a co-host) and Clojure/south (as a speaker). Heart of Clojure was a really special event for me and I truly believe it was one of the best Clojure conferences I’ve ever attended. Everyone looking to create a good conference should learn from Heart of Clojure. Clojure/south was pretty good as well and I dedicated CIDER 0.22 to it and all the lovely people I met there.

Next weekend I’ll speak at a local conference in Sofia for the first time in a couple of years. I’m quite excited to be back at HackConf after a very long hiatus! Afterwards I’ve got just one final conference appearance until the end of the year - the Pivorak Ruby Conference in Lviv, Ukraine.

This will wrap another busy conference season for me and I’ll finally be able to focus on OSS work (and getting some rest). I believe that’s going to be the first time in 5 years I don’t go to any events in November and December, which makes me a bit sad, but we all run out of juice from time to time.

Hardware

Even though I work remotely and spent a lot of my time in Zoom calls, for some reason I never invested in a proper webcam. I bought two good condenser mics early on in my remote career, but I’ve been using my shitty built-in laptop webcam for 5 years now. After numerous jokes from my colleagues that I look like an ominous shadow on most calls (because my desk is right by a window) I finally decided to get a new webcam. After a week of research I chose the Logitech C925e and I’m really pleased with its performance so far. Works flawlessly on macOS, requires no setup at all and has a built-in privacy shade. I might write a bit more about it later.

I also finally bought a DisplayPort cable capable of delivering 4K video at 60Hz, as ever since I got my new 4K display earlier this year I’ve been stuck at 30Hz due to limitations of my 5 year old laptop’s HDMI. I can only tell you that I should have gotten that cable much earlier! 30Hz are kind of acceptable if you only use a computer for work, but everything looks a bit surreal at that refresh rate.

In general I’m more and more convinced that it’s time for me to buy some new computer, but I’ll wait a few more months to see what the holiday season is going to bring to the table. Currently this AMD-powered fanless desktop engineered in Germany seems quite appealing to me. If only they were making those with Zen 2 processors…

Real World

Since my last update I’ve managed to visit 5 countries, made some new friends, reconnected with some dear old friends, attended two weddings and had a lot of fun. Definitely the time I’ve spent in Brazil was the highlight of my travels and I’ll forever cherish some fond memories of Clojure/south and the week I spent afterwards with some colleagues near Recife.

When it comes to books I didn’t make much headway, but I did score a couple of personal wins. I finally managed to read “Crime and Punishment” and I’m pretty close to wrapping up “The Intelligent Investor”, so I’m quite pleased with myself. I’ve been planning to read those two books for a very very long time.

I’ve also been practicing my Spanish by watching “La Case de Papel”. I have to admit that I enjoyed it way more than I expected to. I should find more (good) shows in Spanish!

Last, but not least, I’ve spent a lot of time building and nurturing my investment portfolio. I’ve adopted a simple strategy based on foreign ETFs and some local “dividend” companies. Let’s see if the imminent Brexit is going to wreak havoc to it. I’m mostly worried that half the fintech and brokerages operating in the EU are based in the UK and it’s still not clear what kind of impact will Brexit have on them.