Brave Clojure: Become a Better Programmer

Next week week I'm re-launching www.braveclojure.com as Brave Clojure. The site will continue featuring Clojure for the Brave and True, but I'm expanding its scope a bit. Instead of just housing the book, the purpose of the site will be to help you and the people you cherish become better programmers.

Like many other Clojurists, I fell in love with the language because learning it made me a better programmer. I started learning it because I was a bit bored and burnt out on the languages and tools I had been using. Ruby, Javascript, Objective-C weren't radically different from each other, and after using them for many years I felt like I was stagnating.

But Clojure, with its radically different approach to computation (and those exotic parentheses) drew me out of my programming funk and made it fun to code again. It gave me new tools for thinking about software, and a concomitant feeling that I had an unfair advantage over my colleagues. So of course the subtitle of Clojure for the Brave and True is learn the ultimate language and become a better programmer.

And, four years since I first encountered Rich Hickey's fractal hair, I still find Clojure to be an exceptional tool for becoming a better programmer. This is because Clojure is a fantastic tool for exploring programming concepts, and the talented community has created exceptional libraries for such diverse approaches as forward-chaining rules engines and constraint programming and logic programming, just to name a few.

By learning a variety of programming concepts, you become a better programmer because you're better able to recognize what kind of problem you're working on and apply the right tools. To give just one example: when I'm working on complex UI widgets my work is always made easier if I model the widget using a finite state machine (FSM) - but I had to actually spend time learning what FSMs are and how to use them (those of you with comp sci degrees are probably chuckling at this).

You may have started learning Clojure because you heard that functional programming, Lisp, and immutability can make your life easier, but the fun doesn't stop there! At Brave Clojure, I hope you'll continue using the ultimate language to explore the vast and infinitely fascinating world of computer programming with me.

The first topic we'll explore is parallel programming. Here's the beginning of an ebook on the topic that I'm nearly finished with:

Yes, it would be fair for you to describe my startup as the Google of palm reading. I don't know if you know this, but the fortune telling industry has no quality control standards. There is no Six Sigma of fortune telling. Sometimes it seems like these people are just making things up! We can do better. Did I say we? Yes! I want to you to embark on this startup journey with me. Lucky you! My - our - plan is to disrupt the field with an app that lets a user position their phone so that the camera faces their palm and takes a picture, then predicts the future. I call it: iFacePalm.

And, uh, there's parallel programming in it.

While I plan on spending most of my time helping you and all of your closest friends, enemies, and even frenemies become better programmers by writing about these big ideas, I'm also going to spend time covering practical Clojure topics like deployment and debugging.

To make this happen, I'm working a (great) job only two days a week and spending the rest of the time on Brave Clojure, so I'll need to find a way to derive income from the site. I'm not sure yet what will be free and what won't. My dream is to make all the content available online for free. That's what gives me joy, and I think it's the best way to have a positive impact. Ideally, I would be supported in this endeavor through monthly donations, but I'll likely try different approaches over time.

Finally, I've been putting together two sites to help you up your game: Open Source Clojure Projects, a directory of active projects, and Clojure Work, the first Clojure-only job board. The latter is still in beta, and I'm going to officially release it and move it to https://jobs.braveclojure.com next week. The best way to get better at Clojure is to actually write Clojure, and working on real projects (and even getting paid to do so) is a great way to do that. Companies who buy job board ads will also be supporting me in making more content - hooray!

If you get excited about learning more programming ideas, or learning to develop Clojure programs better, or getting paid cold hard cash to write your favorite language, then I cordially invite you to consider signing up for my newsletter, where I'll announce every release:

Writing Clojure for the Brave and True was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life in large part because I got to interact with so many kind, thoughtful, intelligent people. I look forward to your company as I embark on this new chapter of my journey!

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