eccp

I did the transition from Java to Groovy (because of Grails) which helped me to become familiar with closures and a more functional style of programming, which eventually got me interested in Clojure.

I still think Groovy is valuable as a "better Java than Java" but it's kind of hard to explain to newcomers how much ahead Clojure is. It took me a while to leave my prejudices against the parens and try to understand why it was so powerful and why the LISP family of languages is still alive. It's not by mere coincidence.

Neal Ford said: "In a keynote address that I once co-presented with Martin Fowler, he made a perceptive observation: The legacy of Java will be the platform, not the language."

There are Clojure versions of the examples from the book by Stuart Halloway [1] and Michael Fogus [2]

[1] http://thinkrelevance.com/blog/2008/12/12/on-lisp-clojure

[2] http://blog.fogus.me/tag/onlisp/

Coming from a Windows-only background you'll find it's probably a much smoother experience while developing on a Linux desktop or in Mac OS X.

Installing a nice Ubuntu 13.04 desktop is not complex, there a video which explains installing Virtualbox and Ubuntu under ten minutes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WiiswmOH1Q ... note that a desktop is not required but given your background you would feel more comfortable having a desktop, graphical text editor (eg. gEdit or Sublime Text) and one or more terminals to run the commands.

Another option would be to install Cygwin, an Unix-like environment for Windows: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRB9t2tSsjY and continue the tutorial from there.

Honestly, I think that if you have sysadmin skills, it's likely you'll have some Unix exposure, and if you don't have yet, learning Ubuntu and Linux will be a benefit on the long run.

In the meantime there's a wonderful version of John Cage's "4:33" here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoAbXwr3qkg

Exactly this! ... I started learning Clojure but I was too green to build something complex, so my problem was "Where do I get problems to solve with it?" and somehow I stumbled with Project Euler, where many others implement solutions in other esoteric languages as well.

I think Clojure has a clear advantage here: newcomers always complain about the parens and after an initial time frame we all get it and it becomes a non-issue and as you progress, there is no baroque design, it just composes over itself.

For someone new to Clojure like me, the problem with Clojure is that it's so easy to overlook an existing function and spend a while implementing something which already exists, even in the core libraries.

I had a quick read to a Scala tutorial this weekend and what I remember the most is how ugly the syntax felt, even compared to other languages :-)

I think it's easy to feel overwhelmed but you probably can scale up with Python with little effort with PyPy (time ago you could do that with Psyco) or change your processing to something based on Twisted.

I changed to Liferea too and it surprised me how little took me to get used to it. Also, on Ubuntu 12.04 you get the unread posts count in the launcher (61 items in this screenshot): http://imgur.com/YHDWrIC

Liferea has few issues but they are very minor (ocassional freeze) but it's fairly stable.

Conductor (http://conductor-app.com) is my current favourite.

Works beautifully with Chromium 25.0.1364.160 on Ubuntu 12.04 (25.0.1364.160-0ubuntu0.12.04.1)

Same here. Using 12.04 currently, but with the recent release of Debian Wheezy I'm considering using it for my daily work and getting more involved with Debian as a whole.

Unity user here, but considering changing to KDE soon.

This comment really lit a a lightbulb on me. I also know that I'm a good developer and I've learned a lot of technologies, helped out Open Source software projects and lots more, but I recently realized that I suck at interviews. I've been interviewed (at least remotely) on every company I was interested in and nearly made it.

I really have to work on this.

Excellent work, congrats!

We use DokuWiki (https://www.dokuwiki.org) and it's great, but as any tool, you have to be disciplined and keep the contents up to date, otherwise "wikis are where documentation goes to die."

Most comments tend to cover only code comments or API documentation, but a company has way more documentation than just that: there are policies, procedures, minutes, tutorials and documentation which relates to code but does not live within it.

A small restful web API built on Clojure (with Liberator and Korma) with a client written in ClojureScript, as a proof-of-concept.

Verdana.

Verdana everywhere.

it's the window.onblur handler. If you select "inspect element" the browser opens a new window for the developer tools and the previous window loses the focus, triggering the handler.

It also happens if you load the page then open a new tab. The previous tab will lose focus and close itself.

The default text editor (gEdit) is a competent equivalent of notepad++, it's just that you have to enable some things which would do programming better.

I've worked remotely for the past 4 years as a contractor. I'm in Santiago de Chile, the headquarters are on Sydney.

It has worked fine most of the time, I remember only a handful of times in which I've had to stay up very late because of problems on the production server (we're 12-14 timezones apart!). The support for another of the products of this business is handled by another developer in Sweden, so it's a very distributed team :-)

I've also worked as a contractor with another team based in Cape Town, South-Africa.

To look for remote jobs, besides HN, check on StackOverflow. They allow you to filter job offerings by those which allow telecommuting, but many of them have clauses like "work from anywhere in the US" or "must be a US citizen or have a work permit to work on the US".

Not a full marathon yet, but I'm training for it: Maratón de Santiago on the 7th of April. I ran the 10K on 2011 and the 21K (half-maraton) last year, so this was the natural progression.

My resources:

* one page of the fabulous book "Show me how" by Lauren Smith and Derek Fagerstrom, which I used to train for the 10K and 21K: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_9z1cU74rEAQ/TSotdgSW5lI/AAAAAAAAD4...

* The Hal Higdon website. There are several programs, I'm specifically following this one: http://www.halhigdon.com/training/51137/Marathon-Novice-1-Tr...

> You will learn ruby quicker because you won't have to get bogged down in details about how rails decides to do things.

Exactly! ... one of the most confusing things about Rails is how much you're told not to understand some of the heavy lifting done by the framework, the monkey patching and all kinds of magic tricks all over the place.

I've done webapps programming for long now and I recently followed the Rails tutorial from beginning to end just to make sure I could remember some now obvious stuff about testing, etc. and I understand it can be completely overwhelming if you try to learn all the Ruby + Rails + RSpec + SCSS + jQuery combo at once.

Try something simpler, build something with Shoes (http://shoesrb.com/) or if you're into web apps, something like Sinatra would be a better fit.

There's a database of desktops and laptops compatibility on https://friendly.ubuntu.com/ which helped me to decide which laptop to buy a while ago. I ended up buying a Dell Inspiron N4050 at that time, zero regrets.

If you have access to the folder where the application is deployed (eg. TOMCAT/webapps/) you can take a look at (TOMCAT/webapps/3rdpartyapp/WEB-INF/) and if you see files called applicationContext.xml or any spring.jar files under WEB-INF/lib, it uses Spring.

I don't agree, I'd advise not to try Leiningen until you're comfortable enough with the parenthesis, the REPL and finish the koans themselves. This is 'getting your feet wet on Clojure', koans style. No need to introduce yet another tool when you're not dealing with the issues which Leinengen solves: managing library dependencies and configuration.

I remember I did: the koans first, then tried several exercises on the 4clojure website, then learned about Leinengen and only then I moved into 'projects'.

As a native Spanish speaker: DuoLingo es muy bueno para principiantes! ... some parts of Spanish are simple (acute accents rules are not hard) but verbs are terrible (compared to how simple they are in English) but there's plenty of material to study. Best of luck!

It depends, I was more involved with my daughter when we read the Hello World book and it was really nice because some odd things about computers were explained in simple language, and the character of the kid which questions everything is really fit for this type of book. Also, there were lots of small games with different mechanics.

Python for Kids is really good also, has a intro about the Python language which feels more focused than the other book and it has a chapter about drawing with a turtle, as I did with LOGO many years ago! ... Python for Kids also has plenty of notes about running it on Windows, Mac OS X and Ubuntu so you'd be fine on any OS you have.

I think you should try both, but the best order would be to finish Hello World first and Python For Kids second.

It seems you're lucky:

Doma de Serpientes para Niños - Aprendiendo a Programar con Python:

http://code.google.com/p/swfk-es/

Suerte!

My daughter is following this book (Python for Kids) on her own now, and about a year ago we spent a while reading the Hello World book (http://www.manning.com/sande/) which is a very gentle intro to programming, Python and it was great. I liked Hello World a lot because it explained lots of terms in familiar language and the illustrations and characters were very funny.

She's 12 now so her expectations about games are more influenced by gaming consoles, so I think the next stop will be doing some simple stuff in the Blender Game Engine, which can be programmed in Python too, once she becomes more fluent on programming.

Both books use IDLE as the programming environment, which is fine, but expect to have minor issues along the way: you have to be aware of intentation rules (it's Python) and in one game the library name could not be found because the name started with a uppercase letter ("import Tkinter" in Ubuntu). In Ubuntu you may need to install some extra packages, etc.