Blog posts index page 3

What I allow to shape me

It is impossible for any human to take in all the information available to us. As new technologies emerge, both the amount and pace at which information hits us keep increasing. With an abundance of information, how do we choose which we allow our attention to absorb and which to ignore?

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Neo4clj - an introduction

It started with a business idea a few years ago… a business idea that would require a graph database, specifically Neo4j.

We did explore the existing libraries at the time, but decided to “roll our own” for reasons that now eludes me… and work began on Neo4clj.

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Becoming friends with Clojure protocols

I’ve been programming Clojure for several years, and yet I’ve managed to avoid protocols during all that time (I’ve also avoided macros, but that is another story). I found myself always having a colleague do the “dirty work” or some sad excuse as of why it wasn’t necessary right now. No more… this week I got my hands dirty.

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Stop micromanaging your code

This rant is about a bad habit some developers pick up and seem to have a hard time ditching again… even after gaining lots of experience.

I guess it is to be expected. After having been burned one too many times by missing error handling, in the software they work on, they become overprotective. But it often overcomplicates the code and leaves room (extra lines of code) to place “a fix”, where “the fix” does not belong. Of course, there are plenty of gray areas, murky waters and personal opinions of … exactly where to slice the cake.

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