Page 3 - Jacob Emcken

Stumble upon in Feb 2025

Even if you’re open-minded and free from bad habits and addictions, I believe you’ll find the following a great source of inspiration, just as I did.

About fixing the right problem

It is fascinating how we humans often choose to treat the symptom instead of addressing the actual problem — like endlessly replacing water-filled buckets with empty ones instead of fixing the leaking roof.

At least that is how it felt at work the other day… again. This time though, the problem was easier to spot in the code than usual.

New release of Clojure lib for AWS presigned URLs & requests

The Clojure library aws-simple-sign was in pre-release for more than six months. With a modest download count of just above 2,000 and no reported issues, I finally found the time to promote the 2.0.0-alpha1 release of to a stable version.

For those unfamiliar with aws-simple-sign, it generates presigned URLs for S3 objects and signs HTTP requests for AWS.

A Clojure Jekyll adventure: Getting my feet wet with Liquid

The Liquid templating language is essential for Jekyll and its themes. While a Clojure implementation exists in the form of a library named Wet 💧, ironically, the library is missing most functionality categorized as Tags > Template in the Liquid documentation.

Though we’ll touch on “writing code” in this next part of my adventure, it perfectly illustrates how problem-solving is more about thinking than just writing code.

This is the second part of the series: “A Clojure Jekyll adventure”, exploring how Clojure fares from a “Jekyll perspective”. You can find the previous part here: How my Jekyll blog became a Clojure adventure.

How my Jekyll blog became a Clojure adventure

On the 10th anniversary of Jekyll being my blog engine of choice, my curiosity (and spare time during the holidays) got the better of me. I wanted to explore how well Clojure would fare compared to the original Jekyll implementation in Ruby.

Reflecting on static types

Every time I heard people praise static types, I wondered why I didn’t share their enthusiasm. After careful reflection, I realized that static types don’t significantly influence how I approach or solve problems. I also didn’t experience fewer bugs, easier debugging, or greater team productivity when using them.

As software grows and challenges our ability to reason about it, we seek ways to regain clarity and confidence when making changes. I believe static types provide a sense of security as they are intended to help us manage complexity.

However, I think this sense of security can lead to complacency, causing developers to overlook more effective solutions.

Read code to get better at writing code

Plus 30 years ago, probably around seventh grade, I remember my teacher asking the classroom: How do you get better a writing essays and short stories?

She answered the question herself, and because it took me by surprise, I still remember it today. I had heard grown-ups with their wise words: If you want to be good at X, you have to practice X. X being anything from football to piano to cooking. My younger self had assumed that the best way to get better at writing would be:
To write.

But it wasn’t.

Stumble upon in late May 2024

Summer or something resembling it has come to Denmark, and the winter blues is losing its grip. Grass fields with flocks of sheep have been a common sight along the motorway for a couple of months now. But the other day, I saw something that I don’t expect to see again any time soon. A fairly big bird sitting comfortably on the back of a sheep, and neither seemed to make a big deal about it. It put a big grin on my face. If I had a bad day, I no longer remember. Apparently, my stumblings aren’t confined to the digital world. Though with my limited “getting outside”, I guess that is where it mostly happens, as the following can testify to.

Optimizing & resizing images for Jekyll posts using Babashka

I’ve been tumbling down a rabbit hole for a little while now.

Feeling a desire to “write more” on my blog, motivated me to enhance the overall reading experience. However, customizing a Jekyll blog is not always easy due to the inherent limitations of the Liquid templating language and the modest amount of available plugins for GitHub Pages. Nevertheless, an improved reading experience led me to want a “featured image”. But images tend to affect webpage load speed… and speed matters. The featured image needed to be responsive and optimized, although doing it by hand made me shiver. Any manual repetitive process is boring and prone to errors. On top, it would remove the focus from writing. Suddenly I found myself scouring the internet for information about responsive images and semi-automating the image optimization process with a Babashka script interfacing with TinyPNGs API.

Stumble upon in May 2024

While roaming the internet for information on different topics, I also found a few totally unrelated posts, but interesting nevertheless. I guess that’s what happens when you indulge:
I wonder what else they wrote about?