Andrew Oberstar

I don't write here often, but I also work on open source projects.

Don't commit to grgit

April 2, 2024

TL;DR Before you start or continue using grgit, consider whether you really need it. Can you get by with tasks that call out to the git CLI directly, or write one-off tasks using JGit directly? The time will come (but hasn't just yet) when I stop maintenance.

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Writing my own REPL

December 27, 2020

I'm playing around with a new project, DERL (Data Eval Return Loop, pronounced like Daryll), which I intend to be a data-oriented/REPL-oriented IDE for Clojure.

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Drinking the Clojure Kool-Aid

November 6, 2014

As with Scala, my first experience with Clojure was the 7 Languages in 7 Weeks book. That merely gave me a flavor of Clojure's syntax, but didn't lead me to the deep philosophical underpinnings behind Clojure. More recently, I've been watching a lot of Clojure talks and have found Rich Hickey (creator of Clojure to be a very inspiring speaker. His Simple Made Easy talk is easily my favorite, where he lays out a clear distinction between the concepts of simple (as opposed to complex) and easy (as opposed to hard) and how certain programming constructs contain an inherent complexity. That talk also popularized the term complect (to intertwine or braid) within the Clojure community as a way of emphasizing the precise type of complexity that Clojure intends to avoid.

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Setting Bintray Attributes for Gradle Plugins

September 28, 2014

As part of the new Gradle plugin portal, you need to set some attributes on the version of your plugin package in Bintray.

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Raspberry Pi as Server - DNS and DHCP

December 30, 2012

In my previous post, I mentioned I'm trying to set up my Raspberry Pi as an LDAP and DNS server.

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