- 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: geek
Ashton’s plight, fight or flight
Joel Spolsky is a stellar writer and a fine storyteller. His latest, the apocryphal tale of Ashton, tells of the plight of a software developer stuck in a crummy job, surrounded by sycophants and half-wits, desperate to escape the inevitable … Continue reading
Posted in Business, Entrepreneurship, geek
12 Comments
…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
4 Comments
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
1 Comment
Hosting Maven Repos on Github
Hosting Maven repos has gotten easier and easier over the years. We’ve run the free version of Nexus for a couple of years now, which owns all the other options feature-wise as far as I can tell, and is a … Continue reading
Posted in Clojure, geek, Maven, Random Software Geekery
19 Comments
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
Securing web services in a world with few options
Prelude We’re building a web service for which we aim to charge money. Further, the data being pushed around may be confidential or otherwise of a sensitive nature. We have good reasons to do everything we can to ensure that … Continue reading
Posted in geek, Random Software Geekery
1 Comment
Working with git submodules recursively
Git submodules are a relatively decent way to compose multiple source trees together, but they definitely fall short in a number of areas (which others have discussed at length elsewhere). One thing that immediately irritated me was that there is … Continue reading
Posted in geek, Random Software Geekery
Leave a comment
Whoa, Peter Norvig used some of my code!
I’m generally not one to be impressed by celebrity — you won’t catch me reading People or US Weekly, example. However, this morning I noticed with a shimmer of glee that Peter Norvig used some code that I wrote years … Continue reading
Posted in geek, Random Software Geekery
Leave a comment
Scala Makes Me Think
(…or, “Oh, Dear, Wasn’t I Thinking Before?”) As my friends will attest, I really enjoy programming languages. I’m one of those language fetishists that talk about “expressiveness” and “concision”, and yes, I’m one of those very strange fellows who blurt … Continue reading
Posted in geek, Random Software Geekery, Scala
Leave a comment
Thoughts on Martin Fowler’s Domain Specific Languages Overview
I’m way late in linking to this, but it’s worth it. Last October, a presentation by Martin Fowler from JAOO 2006 popped up on InfoQ (which does a great job of simulating the actual experience of being at the session … Continue reading
Posted in geek, Random Software Geekery
Leave a comment
