Having played both parts in the kabuki play that is employee-employer matchmaking, I feel the way we play it is a zero-sum game. I wish it were not so. When this post started life in 2024, as a wall of text chat message, it was brutal out there, on both sides of the software ind…
Aditya Athalye
45 posts on Planet Forklore
Aiming for last place at the 2025 Berggruen Prize Open Essay Contest, on the theme of consciousness, intelligence, and the nature of mind in an age of advancing artificial systems.
I, for one, welcome the coming age of the post-LLM-datacenter-overinvestment-bust-fueled backyard GPU supercomputer revolution.
Because I realised thinking like this is not obvious to Clojure newcomers, especially those having non-FP first languages. Because I was there too, all those moons ago! Feat. a salty footnote about the misdirected rancour popularly heaped upon CSS (yes, Cascading Style Sheets), …
On trying to mash up SQLite with ideas stolen from Accountants, Clojure, Datomic, XTDB, Rama, and Local-first-ers, to satisfy Henderson's Tenth Law. Viz., to make a sufficiently complicated data system containing an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation o…
The making of a diamond is a repeatable, but naturally non-reproducible process. The exact same input of carbon subject to the exact same configuration of pressure, temperature, forge, time, process control will never produce the exact same diamond twice. Once made, a diamond is…
Is demo of Grug Clojure code vibe. He no catch onto cloud LLM magics for some reason. Still prefer program with only brain-muscles. Prefer use Grug language standard library and standard dev tools. Prefer make and use all byte on local disk. Maybe luddite, maybe obsolete. Grug n…
Strong writing culture transforms merely competent software teams into elite ones; those proverbial 10x product builders. Although creating high-leverage writing culture requries mindful effort, it is not rocket science and one can start small. So... why, when, and how to do it?…
Some thinking, trade-offs, theory building, and method-making one might ended up doing, in the course of bringing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) discipline to brownfield (and greenfield) services, at a small regulated fintech company, having a smaller engineering team that serves …
The first quarter elapsed. Much happened. Much didn’t. We-who-are-reading-this-right-now are perhaps a bit bruised, disheveled, a little worse for the wear, and horribly hung over. But alive. Except you, Mx. LLM. Who knows what’s next?
In a land bereft of a canonical "killer app" web framework or two, one must think about the what, why, how, where of all the moving parts. Out here, one must become a student of web framework architecture in addition to web application architecture. For here, in Clojure-land, th…
On (mis)using Clojure's concurrency features to make an in-memory job runner, because I needed an excuse to use more than atoms for once. Definitely not Rich Hickey's "Ants" demo.
Writing is thinking. Software is peoples' thoughts on repeat. Developers who can pen their thoughts clearly multiply their impact. This matters even more in group work. Common sense rules; no literature major necessary.
The current wave of AI tools is incredibly cool. I hope more people get distracted by the incredible coolness and bet on this wave of AI, because I'm betting the other way, on the hot mess of human general intelligence.
In a world of concrete objects, steel frameworks bring sense and order. In a forest of composable tools, libraries and open-ended schemas, it would be the mycelia. A frustrated yet optimistic man muses "Might such a thing come to be?".
The one in which we design a rich Integrated Development Environment (IDE) experience, using Clojure as our muse. Featuring Language Server Protocol (lsp-mode + clojure-lsp), clojure-mode, cider, and more! Buckle up and get a coffee.
We want to maximize our ability to "stay in The Zone". So the aim is to create the fastest, smoothest, tightly integrated, and unobtrusive mechanism to get things done using the keyboard alone.
Or the one in which we confront our elisp n00bishness and try to be better at using it. And we learn new habits to understand our Emacs better. Better late than never.
Elpa, Melpa, git repo. Vendor package straight from source. It compiled? Fetch some more! Elpa, Melpa, git repo. In more adult terms, we learn to use use-package to fetch, install, initialise, configure useful packages that enhance our Emacs experience.
The first action must, of course, be to colour the bikeshed and set some decent defaults.
Or, finally biting the bullet to redesigning my developerly and writerly experience, from the ground up, with Emacs.
Arguably a more interesting, revealing, and kinder question than "What are you curious about?"
Making a software demo is a form of deliberate, serious play. An act that feeds our curiosity, inventiveness, and drive. It enlivens. It enriches. It entertains. And as we asymptotically approach the A.G.I. that's just around the corner, the capacity for deliberate, serious play…
"What are folks’ views on systems so large where cold-starting the whole system is almost impossible?"... — M'colleague, Shivam, In A Slackroom Next Door.
A while ago, someone in the Recurse Center nerdiverse decided we needed a "Bad Print". They made one. Things escalated. Bad Matrix happened.
Trying out a classification for "Tools for Thought" as a means of augmenting the human intellect, hot on the heels of recent community conversations about ChatGPT, CoPilot, Stable Diffusion etc...
It is with no small thanks to MDN, StackOverflow, Firefox's support for countless open tabs, JavaScript's support for first-class functions, and first-class supportive colleagues, I learned it is possible for a web front end novice to program "text art animations". Whatever that…
Here I illustrate how Clojurists (including Yours Truly) like to solve problems and model things using hammocks, pure functions, and the "it's just data" ideology. Also, while the *problem* focuses on "design in the small" of application logic, many ideas in the *solution* can—a…
Newcomers to Clojure so frequently ask this question that an FAQ/Guide is being discussed, to add to the Clojure website. I struggled a lot with the question too, when starting off in Clojureland. Here are my notes and opinions.
Or, the one in which we hand-craft nano Unix tools using Bash functions.
I find myself telling people that they will have to pry org-mode from my cold dead hands. Which befuddles me. Why, as an ingrate software nerd who has soured on software technology — talk about biting the hand that feeds — do I evince such strong sentiment about a software progr…
FizzBuzz is everywhere. Every programmer passes through its rite of passage, or at least bears witness to another. Over the years, many gentlenerds have taken it upon themselves to discover ever new ways to incant those hoary symbols. I hereby enjoin these few drops of Clojure t…
Or, the one in which we "take apart" Douglas McIlroy's pipeline from 1986. Doing so teaches an object lesson about the essence of modular, composable, functional architecture.
This primer is for people like me, who long dreamed of lovingly hand-crafting our own home on the Internet. We begin our quest by seeing, feeling, and harnessing pure HTML.energy.
Dismal arithmetic is just like the arithmetic you learned in school, only simpler: there are no carries, when you add digits you just take the largest, and when you multiply digits you take the smallest. How does code look in the two languages I like a lot; Clojure and APL?
Or, *Supremely Functional Bash Programming*, an exploration in N parts...
In which we ponder the Functional Nature of Life, The Universe, and Everything. Please feel free to follow through the weeds, or jump straight to the bottom for my 2 nano BTC on the matter. (Or my current state of mind, at any rate.)
Here lies melancholy that I put to paper from a particularly deep hole, not too long ago. It may ruin your day, or it may make you feel a little bit understood about your dark moments. Your mileage will vary.
Technology is—and ought to be—the /byproduct/ of far more important, powerful, and deep-rooted aspects of organisations — including wholesale societies. The pandemic of technology-solutionism gleefully embraced and amplified by all and sundry makes me believe that people seem to…
Every so often, I want to avoid opening a website in a browser, for ... reasons.
Spurred by a conversation with a whip-smart friend and fellow gentlenerd, who unreasonably believed (believes?) they have nothing worth speaking about at the software conferences we like (IN/Clojure, FunctionalConf, local meetups etc).
I've long struggled with the *Technical* Debt metaphor. It was immediately useful when I first heard it. I still think it is useful, albeit as a starting point. The more I worked with software, the more infuriatingly incomplete it started to feel. So I've reframed it as *Softwar…
Not a weighty meandering 300 page Zen dialogue on Motorcycle Maintenance. Merely a meandering blog post in which one contemplates /Quality/ of software products.
Creating things is a delicate endeavour, fraught with peril. People struggle forward through crazy marketplace and environmental complexities just to get from one day to the other. Yet I can't shake off the feeling that we make it harder for ourselves than it should be. I've bee…
How this blog came to be is a minor miracle. Long story short, I conned myself into believing nobody will find /and/ read it. But you're here, aren't you? And you're reading this. Aren't You? Confucamus. Well, here's how you got here.
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