Meta Reduce, Volume 2019.0
Prelude
For a while now I’ve been thinking of starting some form of online journal, following mostly my open-source work and programming exploits, but not limited strictly to that. I know that a blog is supposed to be just that (an online journal), but many of the things I’m working on are not really worthy of dedicated blog posts (and won’t fit in a tweet), and still I feel that they deserve to be shared with a broader audience.1
Lately every edition of Alex Miller’s excellent InsideClojure Journal has been a constant reminder for me to get something done about my idea. And finally here we are - “Meta Reduce” is my version of such a journal - a reduction of my recent activities in writing. I’m not quite certain on the exact format yet, but I guess I’ll sort it out along the way.
It’s very hard for me to write this first post simply because a lot has happened since I returned from my OSS “sabbatical” about a month ago. A lot of things have piled up in my absence and I literally don’t know where to begin. Here we go…
Ruby
I spent a lot of time going over RuboCop’s open pull requests and I hope to get them down to 5-10 eventually. After I merged a fair bit of them I cut a new release. I’ll try to cut a new one later this week.
I would definitely appreciate more people helping out with the review of incoming tickets and PRs, as it’s really hard to keep track of everything that’s going on at this scale. Lately, I’ve rarely checked the issues and focused most of my attention on almost exclusively on PRs.
RuboCop’s next release is going to be pretty special, though, as we are officially deprecating the bundled performance cops in favour of the new rubocop-performance gem. That’s part of the strategy towards RuboCop 1.0 - the development of a robust API for extensions and moving the performance and Rails stuff out of RuboCop’s core. The performance cops will be removed from RuboCop in version 0.68.
One more thing on the RuboCop’s front - I recently found rubocop-daemon and it looks like an interesting option for people who have been frustrated by RuboCop’s slow boot time. Its documentation says:
Now VS Code will use the rubocop-daemon-wrapper script, and formatOnSave should be much faster (~150ms instead of 3-5 seconds).
If that’s true it’s quite impressive! And we really have a big performance problem to solve. :-) I’ll definitely look into this at some point, as it seems like something that shouldn’t be hard to optimize.
I blogged on a couple of Ruby-related topics for the first in a long time. Namely:
Finally, I’ve been working on a new presentation dedicated on Ruby 3 for the RubyDay conference in Italy. Perhaps the talk will also inspire a few blog posts on the subject. We’ll see. The most important thing for me is to meet the members of the local Ruby community.
Clojure
nREPL and CIDER both had major releases recently and I wrote a couple of articles on the subject:
nREPL landed a very important feature just a couple of days ago - the addition of a much-anticipated EDN transport. I hope this will appease the people who have been criticizing nREPL for it’s lack of a built-in alternative of Bencode.
Note: Now we also have Transit-based transports in Fastlane.
I’m pleased to report that almost all of the Clojure-related projects I maintain were migrated from Travis CI to Circle CI. So far I’m really impressed by the improved stability and performance of Circle! I really wish I carried out this migration earlier. Special thanks to Shen Tian, who did a ton of work on this and the EDN transport!
Earlier this week I published to MELPA
parseedn - an EDN parser
for Emacs. I hope that I’ll be able to leverage it in CIDER pretty
soon. I’ll also use this opportunity to remind you we also have
parseclj. It can
potentially unlock some smarter refactoring and static analysis that’s
baked straight into clojure-mode/CIDER. Arne Brasseur created both
projects a while ago, but I haven’t had much time to play with them
yet. I hope that’s going to change this year. Feel free to play with
them as well!
I was reminded recently of the excellent
emidje plugin for CIDER. It
basically provides you with the same functionality you’d get in CIDER,
when it comes to clojure.test or frameworks implementing
clojure.test’s protocol. If you’re into Midje you should check it
out!
As part of Heart of Clojure’s program committee I had the good fortune to participate in the final selection of talks for the conference. There were some many super awesome ideas to choose from that I really regret we could pick only a handful of them. I guess the list of speakers will be publicly announced really soon, but I can tell you now that I’m 100% certain the conference is going to be top notch. By the way, I’ll be the conference’s co-host (together with Saskia Lindner) and I’d like to invite everyone reading this to join us there for an event to remember!
Last, but not least - I’m currently putting the final touches on my upcoming talk at the Dutch Clojure Days conference, that’s going to take place on Saturday. I’m super excited to meet my old Clojure friends and meet a few new ones! See you in Amsterdam!
Haskell
I’m once again trying to level up my Haskell knowledge. I started learning Haskell for the first time a decade ago, but for some reason2 I never got very far with the language. This time around The Haskell Book inspired me to give it another shot. I’ve promised myself I’m not failing again, but time will tell. So far, I’m really enjoying the book (even if it’s a bit slow paced for my taste) and I can heartily recommend it to everyone interested in learning Haskell.
I have to say I’m really impressed by the quality of the Emacs tooling for Haskell. It’s almost as good as Clojure’s in certain aspects and that makes playing with Haskell twice as fun. I’ll probably write about this separately down the road.
Meta Tech
I finally got myself an external 4K display and I totally love it. I think the LG 27UK850 offers a great value for its price and I would definitely recommend it. I spent months researching all the possible options on the market and I’m glad that I’ve managed to put making this decision behind me.
The only problem for me is that getting this monitor reminded me how old my primary laptop is (almost 5 years old, no USB-C, no HDMI 2.0). I’m starting to think it’s time for a new computer. I’ve been a macOS user for the past decade, but I’m really unhappy with Apple from a hardware perspective lately and I wonder if I shouldn’t go back to using Linux. Frankly the only Apple computer I’d consider buying today is the new 6-core Mac Mini, but I think that something like a Hades Canyon or Bean Canyon NUC will probably serve me better. If only I wasn’t a fanatical AMD devotee looking for an excuse to go back home… Haven’t had an AMD-based machine for a very long time now. The last one was sporting an Athlon Thoroughbred-B 2400+ something like 15 years ago. Damn, how much I loved that machine!
Anyways, seems I’m bound to waste a lot of time ruminating on this subject. Researching/buying/building gadgets and computers is one of my favourite pastimes!
In the Real World
I used much of my time off to catch up on reading. I’ve been so busy with work and side projects the past several years that I had read almost no books, and this was a big disappointment for a book lover like me. I’ve read exactly 12 books since the beginning of the year and I’m quite pleased with myself in that regard.3 I focused mostly on sci-fi classics, that I didn’t get to read yet for one reason on another, but I managed to spicy up my reading list here and there. Most recently (yesterday actually), I completed “The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla”. Now I have to figure out what’s next for me, so suggestions would be welcome.
I also managed to find a bit of time for another favourite pastime of mine - movies and TV shows. In my hometown of Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria an iconic cinema was re-opened 30 years after it was shut down. I had the opportunity to visit it and see there great movies like the “Green Book” and “Coziness”4. It felt really special to witness the rebirth of a legend.
On the TV shows side I binge-watched “Narcos: Season 3”, “Narcos: Mexico” and the 7th and 8th seasons of “The Walking Dead”. At this point I seriously wonder why I keep wasting my time with “The Walking Dead”, as the recent seasons have been a far cry from the amazing show it used to be. I did enjoy “Narcos”, though. The new seasons were not as good as the ones focused on Pablo Escobar, but they were pretty decent overall. Plus, these days I enjoy everything more if it’s in Spanish. Anyways, now I’m also accepting recommendations for the TV shows.
Unfortunately, I’ve made no progress with Spanish recently, with sports, or with any of my other hobbies. Maybe next time.
But the thing I enjoyed the most in the past few weeks was simply being back home. I needed a bit of boring routine in my life. And a bit of rest from my vacation. :D
Epilogue
I guess this will do for now. I’m not winning any Pulitzers for this post, but I hope some of you are going to find it useful. I know I’ll find it very amusing if I ever get to re-read it a few years from now. Let me know what you think of the format and if you have any ideas on how to improve it.
Until next time! Keep hacking!