Episode – Mostly λazy…a Clojure podcast   /     Episode 12: Chas Emerick with Ben Orenstein on the Thoughtbot Podcast

Earlier this month, I had the good fortune to sit down with Ben Orenstein (@r00k), who is the host of Thoughtbot’s Giant Robots Smashing into other Giant Robots Podcast.  (He has quite the slick recording arrangement there, with pop filters, “real” microphones, and even a producer that knows what he’s doing…hi Thom!)

Anyway, we had a good chat in which Ben interviewed me on topics various and sundry, both related to Clojure and not, including my talking publicly for the first time about the Quilt Project. Ben graciously agreed to my syndicating the results of our conversation here for the Mostly Lazy audience; I’m thankful to both him and Thom for the opportunity to appear on their podcast.

(Recorded on April 14, 2014, and previously released on April 21, 2014 as episode #95 of Thoughtbot’s Giant Robots Smashing into other Giant Robots Podcast.)

Listen:

Or, download the mp3 directly.

Discrete Topics

(Remember to follow @MostlyLazy so you know who’s going to be on next, and can send us topics and questions!)

• 100% Time
  • Also previously discussed with Craig Andera on episode #31 of the Cognicast née Relevance Podcast
• the Quilt Project
  • a précis of Distributed Systems and the End of the API, a talk given at PhillyETE 2014 (keep an eye out for a dedicated written distillation
• “THE PDF THING”
  • “snowtide.com for all of your PDF extraction needs”
  • The sad tale of Snowtide’s first iteration
  • $140K in debt; payoff; resurrection, and the origins of the PDFTextStream product
• Firewire drives, 15 years ago
• Noam Wasserman’s Rich vs. King concept
• Wherein Chas deconstructs and discredits the entire premise of his livelihood: “The only reason why PDFTextStream exists is because of the waste and incidental complexity that derives from the impedence mismatch between you communicating with me communicating with N other people over this pool of messily-defined, poorly-represented data (i.e. PDFs).”
• A brief summary of how PDFs work
• Clojure Programming from O’Reilly
  • The one with the painted snipe
• ClojureScript open source activities:
  • lein-cljsbuild
  • clojurescript.test (port of clojure.test to ClojureScript)
  • double-check (fork of Reid Draper’s test.check that can be used from both Clojure and ClojureScript)
• Watch out, Ben Orenstein tries to get people to cry on his podcast! – Ed.
• Workaholism, the experience and dangers of
  • weight gain (gained ~70 lbs., gone again now though)
  • negative impact on family, friends, and loved ones
  • sanity
• Concatenative programming languages
  • Factor, Forth, etc
• Von Neumann architecture (For some reason, I kept saying “Von Neumann” instead of Turing Machine! :-/)
• evil-mode for emacs
• multithreaded fork of vim (HN discussion, if you dare)
• “Heaven forfend”