In a day dream, I met a genie. He kindly offered to setup my dream dinner for me. All I had to do was name six guests and they would receive gilt invitations to the best restaurant in the world. Of course, they would all be delighted to attend and would be spared the nuisance of travel arrangements by handy magical teleportation. I hesitated for a moment, there are so many people that I would like to name. The genie tapped his foot impatiently. Alright here they are: ...

I have had my Dualit Toaster for close to 19 years now. It has never broken down. It has reliably toasted my bread every morning with the mere turn of a dial. I have had my dishwasher for 1 year and 2 weeks. It has all sorts of cool buttons and modes so that I can customize my wash cycles to suit my dishes and my mood. Precisely two weeks after the warranty expired, it began to blink randomly and stopped working. The control board had died. This was not an isolated incident. I have gone through many such failures with other appliances, my refrigerator, stove and washing machine. ...

I was delighted to see first hand, why 1200 CodeMash tickets sold out in 20 minutes. It was full of awesome. This was easily the biggest conference that I have ever attended. It was held in the luxurious and fun Kalahari conference center and ran as smooth as silk, expertly supported by a volunteer staff. One of the things that I really appreciated about the conference was the diversity of people from different technology backgrounds. There were many developers from .NET, Java, Ruby, and Python worlds all coming together to swap stories, share ideas and learn something new. It created an opportunity for everyone to get out of their box and their comfort zone. I was particularly impressed by one woman that I talked to, who came from the .NET world but had made a conscious decision to not attend any .NET talks at all. ...

Only one more day until CodeMash. I am really looking forward to my first one. I have heard nothing but wonderful things about this conference that brings together developers, geeks and their families for a week in January in Sandusky, Ohio. I am also looking forward to the opportunity of presenting my “Once Upon a Time in Clojureland” talk. It is an introduction to Clojure in a Fairy Tale format. I am hoping to share my enthusiasm for the language and inspire others to try it out for themselves. ...

One important measure of a country’s economy is it’s technology. Most current technology indexes for countries rely on boring statistics like R&D spending and internet availability. I think that these measures are totally inadequate. To really gauge whether a country is technologically advanced, you need to take a hard look at stupid, pointless, and amusing things produced on the internet. As an alternative, I would like to announce the Nyan Cat Country Technology Index. For those of you who have not heard of Nyan Cat. It is a internet meme that combines a flying Pop Tart cat trailing rainbows and a strange Japanese song. ...

 White: a Blank Page or Canvas. As I spent a pleasant Sunday outside doing yard work, songs from one of my favorite musicals, “Sunday in the Park with George”, came to mind. While the songs were playing in my head, my thoughts again drifted to one of my favorite programming languages, Clojure. To my surprise, I was struck by similarities between the musical, which is about the artist Geroges Seuret and his creation of one of his famous painting, and that of the functional JVM language of Clojure. Granted, musicals, art and programming languages don’t generally get discussed together, but please humor me and let me elaborate. Following the thread of my inspiration, I will be using the first few opening lines from the musical as my headings and guides for my discussion. ...

Long ago, I worked for a couple years as a professional ballet dancer with a small company. Reflecting on this, I have an interesting perspective of working in field were woman are the majority and also one where women are in the minority. I thought I would dedicate this post a few observations of similarities between men in ballet and women in software development. Men in Ballet Have some lame people think ballet is just for girls and make assumptions about them based on cultural stereotypes ...

Since joining EdgeCase, I have shelved my heavy Intellij and Eclipse IDEs in favor of Emacs. Overall, I have enjoyed moving to the light-weight but powerful editor. There is one thing that I did miss from my IDEs – that was the ability to search projects for string occurrences and being able to click navigate to them through the editor. Fortunately, one of the strengths of Emacs is it’s infinite configurability and extensibility. Even more fortunate, one of the guys in our shared office, Doug Alcorn of Gaslight Software, had already written just this feature for his Emacs. I installed it and was so pleased with it, that I thought I would share … ...

I got the chance to share my enthusiasm for two of my favorite technologies at JRubyConf by giving a presentation on Semantic Web and JRuby. It was an excellent experience. I was able to connect with other people that shared my interest in the Semantic Web and some that have even worked with the technologies professionally. Most exciting, I had the opportunity to share my knowledge and hopefully inspire others to look farther into using JRuby with the Jena Semantic Web Framework. ...

Deploying Clojure apps with a single command to the cloud is now possible with Heroku Cedar and let me tell you, it is pure joy. I experimented with this the other day by creating a Compojure web application that compares the followers that two twitter users have in common. Here is the secret sauce you need to push your apps to Heroku: **Procfile: ** You need to create a file in the root of your directory that contains the way to start up your application: ...