I got some actual down time over the holidays and mostly stayed away from the keyboard, which was a nice recharge. Between that and the short week this week, I don’t have too much to talk about but here’s a quick update.

There were a cluster of issues around Maven classifiers that have been frustrating people for a while and I dove in to fixing those in a holistic way this week. I completed that work and released new versions of tools.deps.alpha and the clj tools (one more bug fix is coming in a follow-on release today). These updates also included the fixes I had worked on before the break which address the possibility of a loop in resolving dependency trees with cycles. Combined, those address many of the highest-priority issues around dependency resolution.

Some additional changes included in these new versions are improved error reporting around invalid deps.edn files and what happens when an artifact is not found. Both cases previously threw an exception that resulted in a stack trace but now are caught, given more context, and reported with a bit more context.

I know there are some other tools.deps things people are waiting on and my plan for January is to make periodic headway on those.

Clojure survey

It’s that time of year! I started prepping the 2019 State of Clojure survey - added a couple new questions, tweaked a few of the answers based on the results from last year and got reviews from necessary people. Expect to see this coming your way next week!

Clojure site

Over the holidays, I spent a bit of time updating the Clojure site from using an old JBake 2.5 version to the current stable version 2.6.3, which was long over-due. This opens up some new options in Asciidoc formatting and makes it a little easier to install and use the tools if you’re working on the site.

spec

My new focus is diving back into spec and starting to make good on some of the things Rich talked about in his talk at the Conj. We’re getting some refactoring and grunt work out of the way first and that’s what I’m trying to finish off now.

Non Clojure stuff I enjoyed this week…

I went out to see one of my favorite jazz groups, The Bad Plus, last night and as usual they did not disappoint. I really enjoyed seeing the new pianist Orrin Evans for the first time. I can’t imagine picking up 17 years of back catalog for a group like this. Orrin definitely has his own take on things and it was a great show. Picking a random song I enjoyed last night, here’s Anthem for the Earnest (but with former pianist Ethan Iversen).

I will also not pass up this opportunity to plug the Rational Funk web series by Bad Plus drummer Dave King. Kind of the Spinal Tap of “drum instruction videos”. Music rants, understated comedy, and yes a smattering of actual drum content. Dave is a scary great drummer and I always love seeing him play. Check out this randomly selected episode.