I haven’t written any blog posts in months and I guess it’s high time I changed this. I had promised myself last year that I’d do a lot of writing in 2020, but for one reason or another so far this hasn’t been the case. On one hand I was quite tired after the busy end of 2020, so I needed a bit of time-off from blogging and open-source, and on another - our lives have really changed in the past several weeks by the global coronavirus pandemic. It has been 2 weeks since the complete lockdown started in Bulgaria to fight COVID-19, and the isolation that goes with it. On the bright side - with little to do I’ve got more time for OSS and blogging.

So, what have I been up to recently?

IN/Clojure

In February I’ve travelled to India for the local IN/Clojure conference.1 The conference was really great and was very well organized. Most importantly - I met there so many smart, interesting, diverse, driven and fun people. And they were all passionate about Clojure and creating a better development experience for everyone!2 That’s the best part of every conference for me. Well, I also enjoyed the best Indian food ever around the conference and one truly legendary conference afterparty.3

I took the opportunity to release CIDER 0.24 (India) while I was at IN/Clojure. It’s dedicated to all of India and all the fine people I met there. I never found the time to write a proper release announcement about CIDER 0.24, but it’s a great releases and you definitely want to upgrade to it.

I had the good fortune to attend a couple of meetups as well, while in India - an FP meetup in Bangalore and an Emacs meetup in Pune. Believe it or not this was the very first time in my life I attended any kind of event dedicated to Emacs! That meetup was so much fun! It was particularly cool to be in the audience when Suvrat Apte delivered an awesome talk on CIDER’s debugger!

By the way - you can already find online the recording of my talk from IN/Clojure, titled “The Future of Clojure Tooling”.

The REPL Podcast

Last October I was a guest at The REPL - an awesome Clojure podcast hosted by Daniel Compton. The recording finally went live today. If you’re into CIDER, nREPL and Clojure development tools I guess you might enjoy listening to our conversation.

Major Projects

These days my biggest focus on the OSS front is shipping nREPL 0.7 and RuboCop 1.0. The nREPL release is right around the corner, as it is feature completely and mostly lacks a proper release announcement. RuboCop 1.0 requires a bit more work, but I hope to ship it sometime next month.

Once those are out of the way I’ll focus more on nREPL 1.0, CIDER 1.0, and everything else in CIDER’s Orchard “graduating” to stability.

Smaller Projects

Most of my smaller projects have been on ice lately, with clojure-mode being the only notable exception. I’ve merged and reviewed a bunch of patches there recently. A new release should happen relatively soon.

Meta

The most important thing, given the circumstances, is that so far me, my family and my friends have been spared by COVID-19. Bulgaria introduced the lockdown quickly and I hope this is going to help contain its spread, as our healthcare system is not exactly top notch. If the containment measures fail we’ll finally test empirically whether our national brandy rakiya can truly cure every decease in existence…

I’m fortunate enough to be working remotely, so little has changed in my day-to-day, other than all of the fun aspects of life disappearing all of a sudden. Still, I’m glad that “remote work” is trending these days and I hope that the crisis is going to enlighten many people about its virtues and help propel it to the mainstream. It’d be great if something good came out of this tragedy.

There’s not much to do for fun, besides watching some TV shows and reading some books. Currently I’m binging through “The Wire” and I’m really enjoying it. I’ve been planning to watch it for almost 15 years, so I’m quite happy I got to do this at least. On the reading front - last week I read the first “Witcher” book and it was a lot of fun. I certainly enjoyed it way more than the TV show. This week I’ve started “Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind”, another way overdue item on my todo list.

I miss my “normal” life. The current situation is another reminder of how often you don’t appreciate the important things in life until you lose them.

That’s all for me for now. Stay safe and sane!

  1. That was my very first trip to India! ↩

  2. I also met quite a few people who were very passionate about Emacs. ↩

  3. Which I barely remember. ↩