Clojure Weekly
In today’s super dynamic world of programming it’s hard to keep track of everything important going on in any programming community. Too much information, too many information channels (e.g. reddit, Twitter, Slack, Hacker News, RSS), too little time. I’ve always been a big fan of the weekly newsletter format, ever since I’ve first encountered it in the Ruby community some 15 years ago. Newsletters are typically short, they focus on everything important that happened recently and have a predictable cadence.
Clojure has had several similar initiatives so far. First there was the Clojure Gazette1 by Eric Normand, then we got The REPL from Daniel Compton. While working on this article I also learned about The Def Newsletter, which I had somehow missed completely in the past. Unfortunately it seems it has been abandoned for a while now.
In the past few years
“The REPL” was my go to source for everything important that happened in the Clojure world, but unfortunately
Daniel had a lot on his hands lately and “The REPL” lost some of its traction.
Fortunately, a couple of weeks ago Aleksandar Simic (a.k.a. @dotemacs)
launched Clojure
Weekly,
a curated set of Clojure-related news. I really enjoyed the first 3
editions and I’ve already learned quite a few cools things from there. I even
took some action items for my projects:
- Remove support for Nashorn from Piggieback (ClojureScript dropped support for Nashorn recently)2
- Check out Lambda Island’s Clojure Style Guide and see if I can mine some useful ideas for the Community Style Guide.
It was also nice to read all the nREPL-related announcements for the past couple of weeks, but I’m obviously quite biased on that topic.
Funny enough, the launch of “Clojure Weekly” coincided with “The REPL” coming out of hibernation, but you can never have enough information about Clojure. Looking forward to their next editions!
P.S. If you’re into Emacs I can heartily recommend Emacs News by Sacha Chua. It’s a fantastic newsletter for Emacs users of every skill level!