1. Learn the essentials with Clojure Koans Clojure Koans teaches you the basics of the language by providing a series of tests for you to turn green. The topics and tests are chosen well, and the project’s vibe is pleasant (“calling a function is like giving it a hug with parentheses”). Open a koan. Make it pass. Meditate. Enjoy enlightenment. 2. Move on to 4Clojure problems 4Clojure is a great wa

No, it’s not about tea. We’re continuing our rundown of lesser-known Homebrew features with brew leaves. Let’s check the man brew page: leaves Show installed formulae that are not dependencies of another installed formula. Or, in more computer science-y terms, it shows you the leaves of the Homebrew dependency graph. When to use it brew leaves shows you programs that you can safely uninstall. If y

gitsh is a new way to use Git: instead of running Git commands in a general purpose shell like zsh or bash, gitsh provides you with a dedicated shell just for your Git commands. Many of the early Unix utilities, like dc, didn’t take sub-commands like Git and other modern programs do, instead they launched a shell. For a program like Git, which has so many commands and options, interacting via a sh

Clutter in programmer workspaces, whether digital or physical, can add a mental cost. An area of common clutter is the ~/Downloads directory in Mac OS X. I want to clean it up … programmatically. The Goal I want a background job to find files in ~/Downloads which haven’t been modified within the past week and move them into ~/.Trash. In zsh, the command for this is: mv ~/Downloads/*(mw+1) ~/.Trash

The Unix shell is often overlooked by software developers more familiar with higher level languages. This is unfortunate because the shell can be one of the most important parts of a developer’s toolkit. From the one-off grep search or sed replacement in your source tree to a more formal script for deploying or backing up an entire application complete with options and error handling, the shell ca

For several years, there have been two ways of getting in touch with us for feedback regarding our open source projects: GitHub, for reporting bugs or submitting patches in the form of pull requests. Mailing lists, for general discussion and questions, including ideas for new features. However, over time, we’ve grown to feel as though the mailing lists are not pulling their weight. For one, the ma

Requests to external services during test runs can cause several issues: Tests failing intermittently due to connectivity issues. Dramatically slower test suites. Hitting API rate limits on 3rd party sites (e.g. Twitter). Service may not exist yet (only documentation for it). Service doesn’t have a sandbox or staging server. When integrating with external services we want to make sure our test sui

We recently switched from RVM to rbenv for managing Ruby versions. “Make each program do one thing well.” - Tenet #2 of The UNIX Philosophy Why consider switching to rbenv The UNIX philosophy espouses an approach to software in which small, sharp tools are designed and used to address discrete needs. By this standard, RVM simply does too much. RVM is responsible not only for changing Ruby versions