Author: Stuart

Clojure talk at Philly Lambda

The folks at Philly Lambda, a Philadelphia functional-programming group, were kind enough to invite me down to talk about Clojure last night. No video/audio recording, but here are my slides [PDF].

The consequences of not deciding

Reading Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely, I came across this passage: “One of my friends spent three months selecting a digital camera from two nearly identical models. When he finally made his selection, I asked him how many photo opportunities he had missed, how much of his valuable time he had spent making the selection,…

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Twitter Heckling

I have, to my chagrin, recently discovered Twitter. I was at a conference at which the attendees twittered (tweeted?) every presentation as it happened. One speaker accidentally/deliberately left his Twitter client running during his presentation, resulting in a stream of jokes and off-color comments in the corner of his PowerPoint slides. Maybe every presentation should…

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Big & Small at the same time

I haven’t posted in a while — look for more later this summer. But in the mean time, I have a question: How do you structure data such that you can efficiently manipulate it on both a large scale and a small scale at the same time? By large scale, I mean applying a transformation…

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Clojure talk at LispNYC, June 9

Update: Slides and video available at LispNYC. Ok, it’s really happening this time: Stuart Sierra presents: Implementing AltLaw.org in Clojure This talk demonstrates the power of combining Clojure with large Java frameworks, such as: Hadoop – distributed map/reduce processing Solr – text indexing/searching Restlet – REST-oriented web framework Jets3t – Amazon S3 Join us from…

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Clojure Talk May 12 Canceled

We had to cancel my talk for tomorrow night, due to problems with the venue. LispNYC will still meet at the Sunburnt Cow, 137 Avenue C, for drinks and discussion. My presentation has been postponed to the June meeting.

It’s About the Libraries

There’s a big ‘ol thread going on down at comp.lang.lisp about Clojure vs. Common Lisp. I’m biased, of course, but I have to say that Clojure and Rich Hickey are holding their own against some of the top c.l.l. flamers. But all the arguments about functional programming, software transactional memory, and reader macros miss what…

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Hadoop Meetup 2/10

Just a little self-promotion: I’ll be presenting at the New York Hadoop User Group on Tuesday, February 10 at 6:30. I’ll talk about how I use Hadoop for AltLaw.org, including citation linking, distributed indexing, and using Clojure with Hadoop. Update 2/28: My slides from this presentation are available from the Meetup group files.