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ejstembleron Ask HN: How did you land your first projects as a solo engineer/consultant?

Word of mouth / former employer

ejstembleron SQLite as an Application File Format

The Acorn macOS app uses SQLite in a similar way: https://flyingmeat.com/acorn/docs/technotes/ACTN002.html

Looks interesting! +2 for Postgres and AWS support. Looking forward to GCP support someday...

ejstembleron Don't Refactor Like Uncle Bob

The man has moved on to functional programming since then. People are allowed to change.

I have 211+ programming books in my library going back to 1998. I don't consider any books from 16 years ago to be valuable or relevant today.

ejstembleron Next-generation web framework Teo, supports Node.js, Python and Rust

Good point

ejstembleron Don't Refactor Like Uncle Bob

Someone is criticizing a tech book written 16 years ago? *insert Jackie Chan meme here*

ejstembleron Nature: Programming language to experience the joy of programming

Congratulations weiwenhao! I like what I see so far and am looking forward to following the continued development of the language. Do you have any social media accounts set up for the language (e.g. X, Mastodon, Blue Sky, etc.) that people can follow?

ejstembleron Essence: A desktop OS built from scratch, for control and simplicity

The GUI is reminiscent of BeOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS or Haiku https://www.haiku-os.org/

ejstembleron Polylith is a functional software architecture at the system scale

I tried looking into Polylith a few months ago, when I first discovered it. I recall the feeling of experiencing information overload. Though, I am not a Clojure expert either, so that probably compounded my issue.

I believe it would be beneficial to supply more example projects. I found one, https://github.com/furkan3ayraktar/clojure-polylith-realworl..., however, it uses SQLite. Maybe an example which uses Postgres, and Redis for caching would be more real-world? Also, maybe a few deployment examples? Heroku, AWS, GCP, Kubernetes?

One question I have, how are ENV variable driven configurations handled? For example, if I need a `DATABASE_URL` etc. I recently ran into an issue, https://discord.com/channels/313110246643990528/313110246643..., in my own Clojure web service attempt where I could not use `def` to define the individual variables since they are evaluated at Uberjar build time. I eventually converted it to a `defn` but then it gets evaluated every time it's used.

ejstembleron Readme.so – Easiest Way to Create a Readme

Nice! One suggestion I have is replace the ```bash references with ```console

ejstembleron Nim 1.4

Great! Where's the announcement on https://twitter.com/nim_lang so I can retweet it?

ejstembleron Ask HN: What is your blog and why should I read it?

https://ejstembler.com

I've had a blog since 1998, though my posting frequency has waxed and waned over the years. I use it as a partial résumé and also as outlet for my interests. Mainly, Software Engineering, Machine Learning, Data Science, Electronics, Robotics, Cooking, DIY, Cars, Travel.

Last year I had a falling out with my blog host, GoDaddy. They convinced me to upgrade up a level ($3xx). Though when their site transfer service didn't work they said they'd have to charge me another $150 to get the back-up. That's when I cancelled all of my accounts with them. I didn't like WordPress/PHP anyhow. In my haste to cancel GoDaddy, I forgot to export my content from WordPress. That's when I slowly starting writing my blog from scratch using Crystal, Kemal, and Bulma. Some of my content I was able to retrieve via scraping the Internet Archive, and some I was able to extract from Mars Edit by parsing the Content.plist files.

I'm very happy with the blog code and utilities I wrote, it was a fun exercise. Now I need to dedicate more time to writing...

ejstembleron Towards Crystal 1.0

I couldn't get embedded templating to work for nim. Something similar to Ruby's ERB: https://ruby-doc.org/stdlib-2.7.0/libdoc/erb/rdoc/ERB.html. Or Crystal's ECR: https://crystal-lang.org/api/0.21.1/ECR.html

ejstembleron Towards Crystal 1.0

Though I have a long history with IDEs I feel just as comfortable with the console, or the lighter-weight, electron-based IDEs.

For the last couple of years I've lived pretty much exclusive in the Ruby/RubyMine, Python/PyCharm, Scala/IntelliJ worlds.

However, I recently finished a medium-sized Crystral project only using VSCode. For debugging, I wrote unit tests and kept Sentry running. The compiler pretty much catches everything else. The combination worked out very well.

ejstembleron Towards Crystal 1.0

I actually started writing my blog in Crystal, took a little break, and started writing it in Nim. I really like Nim a lot. Some of the code came out more concise in Nim. I like how Nim handles nils better. Options instead of temp var shadowing. I would've finished my blog in Nim had I not ran into an issue with embedded-style templates. Think eRb in Ruby. Crystal handles this by compiling and embedded. Nim doesn't support that. I had to resort to something like Mustache which I didn't want to use. Ultimately, I went back to Crystal and finished it.

ejstembleron Towards Crystal 1.0

I wrote my blog using Crystal 0.33 (plus kemal and bulma) and it's great! https://ejstembler.com

ejstembleron Amadine – Vector graphics software for Mac

Is it truly native? I was digging around and found some references to https://www.wxwidgets.org. I thought the GUI looked a little off to be truly native...

ejstembleron Visualize your Outlook meetings using Ruby and NVD3

I originally wrote the code back in 2014 (Ruby 1.9.3-p545), but just now got around to blogging about it and putting the code in a repo. Better late than never I guess.

ejstembleron Merging Maps

I'm surprised the author doesn't go into deeply nested maps and deep merges. That's an issue none of the languages solves natively.

ejstembleron How You Know

Having read Carl Sagan's Cosmos in my youth, I always feel guilty re-reading a book:

“If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read.” ― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

ejstembleron Evaluating Rails Projects

Good article. In addition to running flog, I also run brakeman and rails_best_practices.

ejstembleron Project Tango

Pretty much all junk and ancient looking. It's sad this genre has not advanced.