Category: tech
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Clojurenote - A Clojure library to access the Evernote API
Recently I've been having a lot of fun using the Evernote API from Clojure, especially as part of developing Orinoco. I've now open-sourced my lowest-level Evernote code as Clojurenote.
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Why Evernote?
I've been using Evernote a lot recently. In fact, I've gone a little bit overboard. Being an every-day human user wasn't enough so I started writing applications that use Evernote. And I went to their conference. And I'm even in the analysis stages of starting a business based on Evernote. But why? Here I give a few reasons that hopefully give some method to my Evernote madness.
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Connecting to a remote PostgreSQL Database on Heroku from Clojure
Sometimes it's useful to be able to debug a local application running against a remote production (or staging) database. The app I'm currently working on is a Clojure app, running on Heroku, using PostgreSQL as a database. It wasn't entirely obvious (to me) how to do this, but here's how I did it in the end.
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My Evernote Conference 2013
The Evernote Conference (EC 2013), which happened last week (Sept 26, 27) in San Francisco, was not my usual conference. Typically I go to events that are mostly or solely geared around software development, that I've heard good things of directly from friends or colleagues, and where I know I'll come across a few people I know. EC 2013 had none of these. So why did I go? And how did it turn out? I'll give you the skinny - I didn't get quite all that I hoped, but got more than I expected. For more, read on.
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20 years of Desktop Computers
This week I sold my iMac. I now no longer own a desktop computer, for the first time in 20 years. I'll get to why at the end, but I thought it might be fun to take a look back over these 2 decades of my personal PC history.
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Asking better questions
I didn't know Aaron Swartz. I met him very briefly in December but that was all. Nevertheless it's been a realization this last week and a half hearing from those that did know him what an amazing human he was, and how much of a loss there is for the world in his passing away too soon.
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Agile people over agile process
In June 2012 I gave a talk at QCon New York titled 'Agile people over Agile process'. The full talk is here, and below are some of my thoughts on this topic.
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Leaving DRW, and my take on Customer Affinity
Last month I finished working at DRW Trading after nearly 4 years there. DRW has a fantastic technical organization on both the Software Engineering (SE) and IT Operations side, from the leaders (CTO Lyle Hayhurst, COO Seth Thomson and Director of SE Derek Groothuis) down. In many ways I expect this will be one of the best jobs I ever have - my technical colleagues were fantastic (especially Jay Fields, my right hand man for the last 18 months), my team had complete management and implementation control of our projects, I didn't have to deal with much in the way of politics at all, and yes, the pay was good!
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Syncing music to iPod / iPhone from lossless iTunes library
For listening to music at home I use an Apple TV plugged into my fancyish sound system, and so I use music stored in lossless format. Since I use an Apple TV this music is stored on a computer using iTunes. I also have an iPhone, and my music library is on there too, but I can't fit my entire lossless library on there (it's more than 100GB) so up until now I've also kept a totally separate iTunes library, on a different computer, with the same music in 128kbps AAC format that can fit on my iPhone.
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Dual KVM Pairing
Previously when I've pair programmed (2 people programming at the same computer at the same time) I've always used one keyboard, screen and mouse (KVM - V means Video). In the last couple of weeks I've been trying out 'dual KVM' pairing though - in this scenario each programmer has their own keyboard, mouse and monitor, where the screens are setup to mirror each other (each person sees exactly the same thing)