- I am the founder of Snowtide — which sells PDFTextStream, a PDF text extraction library for Java and .NET – and the creator of the Clojure Atlas. I do a lot of programming in Clojure and just a little in Java.
– Chas Emerick
Category Archives: Craftsmanship
Clojure Atlas (Preview!)
Today, I’m opening up a “preview” site for Clojure Atlas, a new side project of mine that I’m particularly excited about. Clojure Atlas is an experiment in visualizing a programming language and its standard library. I’ve long been frustrated with … Continue reading
Posted in Clojure, Clojure Atlas, Craftsmanship, Random Software Geekery
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…wherein I feel the pain of being a generalist
I’ve lately been in a position of offering occasional advice to Lee Spector, a former professor of mine, on various topics related to Clojure, which he’d recently discovered and (as far as I can tell) adopted with some enthusiasm. I … Continue reading
Posted in Clojure, Craftsmanship, geek, Maven, Random Software Geekery
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The placebo effect is what makes the software world go ’round
I’ve been of the opinion for some time now that software development, regardless of the methodology followed or the tools used, is not an engineering discipline (unfortunately), but rather is a craft. I recently laid out that opinion in some … Continue reading
Posted in Craftsmanship, geek
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Programming and software development, medium-rare
Both of my grandfathers were involved in engineering; knowing something of what they did makes me even more sure that what I do is not related to engineering. Continue reading
The beauty of letterpress and craft and old arts faithfully renewed
Having worked primarily with PDF documents and all the minutiae of their fonts and such over the years, I’ve come to have a great appreciation for typography and the now-ancient crafts that gave birth to it. I draw a tenuous connection from there to my own work. Continue reading
Posted in Clojure, Craftsmanship, lisp
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Activity is not Progress (or, ‘Did you really need to shave that yak’)
Anyone who is accountable for any sufficiently-complex objective is constantly having their focus being pulled away from that larger goal by a thousand different fiddly tasks. Christened as yak shaving some time ago by a fellow at the MIT media … Continue reading
Posted in Craftsmanship, PDFTextStream
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Automated Quality Control, Part II
In my last post about quality control, I detailed the challenges we face in testing PDFTextStream in order to minimize hard faults, and some of the patchwork testing ’strategy’ that we employed in the early days. Now, I’d like to … Continue reading
Posted in Craftsmanship, geek, PDFTextStream, Random Software Geekery
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Automated Quality Control, Part I
Quality control is critical to the success of a business, and in turn, to the success of its customers as well. This is doubly true in the case of software businesses and products, where problems and defects are rarely obvious. … Continue reading
Posted in Craftsmanship, geek, PDFTextStream, Random Software Geekery
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Functional vs. Transparent APIs
I’ve been mulling over the relationship and differences between PDFTextStream’s API and other PDF-related API’s. I was originally going to write a pretty long tract on this topic, but relented mid-way because I realized that I likely don’t have the … Continue reading
Posted in Craftsmanship, PDFTextStream
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