Page 5 - Jacob Emcken

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?

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.

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.

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.

Hosting ClojureScript SPA using Shadow-cljs on Netlify

Building ClojureScript Single Page Applications (SPA) on Netlify just works. The following instructions require no prior knowledge of neither Netlify nor build tools (like Shadow-cljs, WebPack etc.), but some knowledge about HTML and Git is expected.

Heroicons from ClojureScript

Update 2022-02-20: Requiring single icons using :refer causes ALL Hero icons to be included in builds (even optimized). Instead, use :as (multiple times). Examples below have been updated.

In my opinion, Clojure and ClojureScript is lacking in the documentation department, especially when it comes to integrations with things outside the Clojure ecosystem.

Symptoms of lacking software quality

What makes up good software quality is different from person to person, making it somewhat subjective and hard to define measurably.

2020 in retrospect

This post is about me. By me, for me.

Realtime DB synchronization to frontend

I’ve set out to solve: How to synchronize “low volume” parts of a database to a frontend in real-time, exclusively for reads. In this scenario, “low volume” means few entries with a low update frequency. Let’s say we’re talking about less than a thousand entries affected by fewer than ten updates every minute across all entries.

Why do we allow poor software quality?