It’s finally over. This awful year has ended. My work life hasn’t changed much, although I had to organize my work blocks in a better way. My personal life, on the other hand, was quite affected, specially for my kids and partner; they were the most affected by having to start kindergarden classes via Zoom (my kids), and almost completely stop they work life (my partner).

I did manage to do some stuff that I find nice to share, and hopefully will continue doing in 2021:

• I dedicated more time to this blog again.
• I have a newsletter now; please go and subscribe!
• For the first time in my life I joined the Advent of Code, although for different reasons I’ve stopped working on the challenges; I’m planning on continue with them in my upcoming vacations.

I don’t believe in magical dates and I know it’s not that January 1st, 2021 will be automatically better: COVID-19 still exists, travel is restricted, the economy in this country (Argentina) isn’t getting any better, etc, but I’m looking forward to see what the new year will bring and work on making things better, not only for me, but for my family.

This week’s episode was delivered a little bit earlier because this Jesus guy stole my thunder and decided to celebrate his birthday on Friday. Anyway, if you are not happy with GitHub’s repository page UI, or want to program without using your keyboard, or are you in doubt if you should use a NoSQL database or an old RDBMS, then you don’t want to miss this episode.

Today I brought you a little bit of space and programming, more programming history, how to get recognized at work, designing better documentation, and speeding up your CI pipelines by cloning your repositories in a faster way. You don’t want to miss it!

I had a very busy couple of days at work, so I couldn’t get too much done in Advent of Code. Working on day 7 took me a while to figure out the solution, specially in part 2. But I did it.

I think the biggest issue that I faced was that I was still trying to think in terms of procedural programming and not functional programming. I’m definitely not happy with the solution, again specially part 2, but it works. I’m definitely looking forward to start refactoring the code and looking for better solutions.

The wait is over! Issue #3 of inkelinks it out. Feel free to check it for a weekly dosis of design, history, and speeding your Bash shell startup times.

So far these are the challenges that I liked the most, I think. Also, a feeling that I’ve been having lately was that the code is a mess (to be expected because I’m learning) and this particular day’s solutions showed me exactly that: there are lots of refactorings to apply that will make the code more reusable and maintainable. I don’t plan on doing that yet, but it’s likely I’ll do it in the upcoming days.

These day 5 solutions took me a little longer, yet nothing compared to how long it took me when I started with Clojure.

One thing that I always knew theoretically but now I can confirm because of working with it the last few days is that the level of expressiveness is astonishing. I was very comfortable when I was programming in Ruby because I felt that it was too easy to translate my thoughts into code, but I’ve got to confess that while I’m nowhere near that level of comfort, I’m liking it more and more as each day passes.

Last night I solved day 4 part 1 of the Advent of Code 2020 challenge, and this morning I finally solved part 2, thus solving day 4 completely. While arguably days 2, 3, and 4 have “simpler” challenges than day 1, they were still challenging, specially given how unfamiliar I am with Clojure’s syntax and API.

I feel more confident as each day passes, and I’m getting more proficient with the environment as well. I hope that by the end of Advent of Code I feel confident enough to try Clojure in a small project at work.

I’m on a roll! Day 1 was painful; in day 2 I did some improvements, and now day 3 was also solved in less than 2 hours!

I’m getting more familiar with Clojure, and the tools I use for this project: Leiningen, Emacs + CIDER. About the latter, I know I could be more efficient if I knew the commands better, but so far it is really useful and I’m not only learning tons but also in awe as to how well integrated this tool is.

Funny how day 1 took me 4 days to solve but I was able to solve day 2 in just an hour. I guess the challenges are not strictly in a increasing order of complexity.

I also like that I think my Clojure programming style is getting better as the time passes, which in the end was my sole main objective.

Let’s see what day 3 lies ahead…