Recently Arne Brasseur shared a pretty cool idea over at Lambda Island - namely to do a blogging alternative to the popular “Advent of Code” this holiday season. Arne challenged himself to write a blog post every day from the 1st of December to the 24th of December and dubbed this challenge “Advent of Parens 2019”.

I loved the idea, as I desperately needed some motivation to write more. This year I’ve often been pondering about the impact that goals are having on our lives and productivity. I even wrote a little bit on the subject in a previous post. Today I pledge my intention to take part in Arne’s challenge! This short post serves two purposes - it’s my declaration of participation and it’s also my first entry in the “Meta Advent 2019”.1

I haven’t thought much about the topics I’ll be tackling over the next four weeks, but knowing me there will be a healthy amount of Emacs, Clojure and Ruby articles in the mix. Unlike Arne, I don’t have any articles that I’ve already written and are ready for publishing, but I’ve got a huge backlog of ideas and I love to improvise. One topic is clear - I still have to write a summary of the results of “The State of CIDER 2019” survey.

I was wondering whether I want to do a double challenge and target a blog post per day on both “Meta Redux” and “Emacs Redux”, but I’ve decided I shouldn’t be overly ambitious with V1. Maybe next year… I’m still wondering whether it’d be cheating if I spread those 24 blog posts over the two blogs. I guess I’ll figure this out as we go.

I’d love to see more people joining our little blogging advent. I think this will be a lot of fun! That’s all from me for now. See you tomorrow!

  1. I know it feels like cheating, but I’m one lazy scoundrel. ↩