Audience:Clojure beginners

Every language has warts. This is not the first wart piece written on Clojure, but it’s my unique take on it. There are some workarounds, but these will bite newbies. Despite these minor annoyances, I still find Clojure to be the best environment to work in for many years to come.

Programming in Lisp is a different kind of programming. Some things seem similar to your daily imperative treadmill, but mostly it’s different. There’s a different lexicon of terms, REPL-driven (or rather, -dominated) programming, there’s immutability, a really different type of (par)editing, a higher level of conciseness, a naturalness to using HoFs, a leaning on a small set of primitives, recursion as the norm, and so on.

It’s worth gaining some proficiency with a Lisp, if anything, to change the way you think about programming. In this post I explore the Lisp landscape, and try to convince you to get in on the Racket, for edification, fun, and even profit.

I’ve been hooked on CentOS for servers for a couple years now. We used to use Ubuntu, but I see several advantages to choosing CentOS over Ubuntu and others. Here’s why:

UPDATE 2017:

Smooth updates. Since starting all our servers out on CentOS 7.0, they’ve all been cleanly upgraded to 7.3 without any fuss or ceremony. Looked like any other daily update.

It has been a difficult decision to consider moving to Emacs. Besides discovering that it had some superpowers that Vim lacked, I had a niggling feeling that most of my programming heroes were already using Emacs. So I did some digging around to see who were the luminaries.

The digging turned up that the following all use Emacs. (Sorry for not recording many references.)

Audience:sysadmins

I’ve been keeping an "Outages Log" for the last few years to track downtime and causes of failures (sometimes they’re only theories). This has turned out to be an invaluable record, so I’ll share the idea here and encourage you to keep one, too.