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

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.

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.

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

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

For those of you unfamiliar, Raspberry Pi is an inexpensive computer that can run Linux and is about the size of a credit card. I think it was primarily designed for educational purposes -- to get kids into computers -- though it works well for a lot of other use cases. When I got mine, I started off with Raspbmc, the XBMC install for the Pi. I had a few issues and decided to stick with my existing Boxee Box for now.