Clojure Hack Night Monday, in Reston

The Capital Area Clojure Users’ Group is hosting an evening of collaborative Clojure coding next Monday, August 2, at 6PM, at Near Infinity, in Reston. Details are available at the group’s meetup page.

Some very experienced people will be on hand, as well as newcomers. We’ll spend some time at the beginning answering questions and helping people with their setups as necessary. (Emacs FTW!) Then it’s on to pair programming. Possible coding projects are listed on the group’s meetup page. More ideas are welcome. There’s a lot of open source Clojure code that needs writing.

Please be sure to sign up through meetup if you’d like to come: spaces are limited.

Date management for the mashup project

I’m posting the code I’ve written for date management in the mashup project. It’s just a sketch, really. There’s plenty of work to do to fill it out. But I wanted to post what I’ve got now.

Capstone project: stepping back for a moment

We have a capstone project, a reworking in Clojure of some of the mashup features of Yahoo Pipes. At our last meeting, Luke VanderHart presented a framework for building and connecting components. I’m going to recap the framework as well as a few philosophical decisions we hammered out. But I’m also going to invite you to take a look at the code with me, with an eye towards 1) understanding each bit and 2) replaying the development of the framework by starting with simple building blocks. Luke and I both agree that the current framework, although awesome, has leapfrogged the kind of discussion and collaboration we want to foster in the study group. So I’m going to try an experiment with coding in public. On this blog, and soon on github, we’re going to build the framework again, together, feature by feature, always embracing the principle of the simplest thing that could possibly work. We’ll build up the might of Luke’s framework, but in a way that we get there together. And we’ll probably make it better from all being involved.