Clojure Course in Edinburgh on 7 September

I'm pleased to announce that my Clojure Kickstart course will be held at Neo's offices at TechCube in Edinburgh on the 7th of September 2013.  This course is aimed at beginners and improvers who want to learn Clojure or push their existing skills on to the next level.  

Tickets are now available at http://clojure-kickstart-scotland.eventbrite.co.uk/ for £30.  Just to be clear, the fee is intended to cover costs and anything extra I make will be invested back into making the course even better.

The course will be heavily based on practical exercises.  You will learn...

• The basic syntax and usage of Clojure
• The core elements of the Clojure ecosystem
• What sort of problems are people solving with Clojure in the real world
• How to make the paradigm shift from Object Oriented to Functional Programming
• Parallel/multi-threaded Clojure programming and Clojure's transactional memory model

Although Clojure is in its infancy in Scotland, the London community is very strong and I am  delighted to welcome London Clojurian Malcolm Sparks (https://juxt.pro) to Edinburgh as guest facilitator.  

Malcolm will be on hand to help you with the exercises and this is a rare opportunity to get a full-time Clojure programmer's insight on how you can improve your Clojure and Functional programming.  He will also be giving a talk on how Clojure is used in the real-world that will take us all beyond the texbook and into the trenches.

Finding The Way

Everyone on the Internet is an expert.  Some of them might actually be.

It can be easy to feel like you are chasing an impossible goal when every blog you read makes it look like the author has it all sorted out and their code just flies off their finger tips ready for a quick spot of refactoring and then straight into production.

I don't think it's really like that but I still wonder sometimes if I could somehow make myself more productive by working slightly harder.

An old story  I found on the Aikido FAQ might tell you some of the mindset you ought to apply when studying martial arts and I think it applies to programming too.

A young boy traveled across Japan to the school of a famous martial artist. When he arrived at the dojo he was given an audience by the Sensei

"What do you wish from me?" the master asked. 

"I wish to be your student and become the finest kareteka in the land," the boy replied. "How long must I study?" 

"Ten years at least," the master answered. 

"Ten years is a long time," said the boy. "What if I studied twice as hard as all your other students?" 

"Twenty years," replied the master. 

"Twenty years! What if I practice day and night with all my effort?" 

"Thirty years," was the master's reply. 

"How is it that each time I say I will work harder, you tell me that it will take longer?" the boy asked. 

"The answer is clear. When one eye is fixed upon your destination, there is only one eye left with which to find the Way."

todo.text

I've been looking for a todo app that fits my workflow.  It must...

• Work across my devices
• Allow me to do GTG style task tracking
• Make it easy to categorise tasks HOW I WANT TO 

You would think it would be simple.  Indeed there are many apps that fit the first 2 categories but the last one is a killer and it seems that most task apps force you to organise your tasks by date (which is pointless when you have a calendar to do that) or priority (which is also pointless because priorities change according to your context).

However, Rob Lally recommended todo.text and it seems to fit the bill nicely.  It uses simple text files to store tasks and dropbox to sync them up between devices.  You also have a command line interface to enter and manage tasks and because it's just text you can sort, search, chop and change using normal UNIX tools.

I used the homebrew package to get started.  It doesn't work out of the box (for version 2.9m at least) but the instructions at http://dangerisgo.com/blog/2012/09/20/setup-todo-dot-txt-cli-on-osx-with-homebrew-and-dropbox/ did the trick.  

One little gotcha - when you change the home location in the cfg file to point at dropbox, make sure you comment out line 5 which sets the location to the install directory.

I'm planning a Clojure course In Scotland

The London Clojurians are running a Clojure dojo on the 29th of January.

This got me thinking that maybe would could do some kind of hands-on course or dojo in Scotland so I have created a survey to gather more information.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/WDCTMHM

Any help you can provide by completing and sharing this survey would be greatly appreciated.