Software — Tools of the trade

• Clojure & ClojureScript· This is my fifth year working professionally with Clojure. This year I feel particularly grateful for clj-kondo and clojure-lsp, and will support borkdude and Eric Dallo in 2025.
• Portal · Used this Clojure library every time I needed to inspect a big data structure.
• MacBook, macOS · This is my second year using an M1 MacBook. Love it.
• Raycast · Command launcher. Probably the best free window manager for macOS too? The Emoji Picker is better than the native option. I wrote a little extension to use my favorite Thesaurus website with fewer keypresses and it got more installs than expected.
• FigJam · After trying Lucidchart, Mermaid, Omnigraffle, Whimsical and so on and so forth, FigJam is my favorite diagramming tool by far. Pretty much all tech specs I wrote this year at work contained a FigJam diagram.
• Frame0 · Prototyped a couple of web app screens, used in PR reviews to suggest UI changes. Very easy to use, beautiful results. The creator also open-sourced the handwritten-style Loranthus font created for it.
• Notion · In the lifelong pursuit for the perfect time management tool, I’ve tried Vim + a large text file, Vim + small text files, org-mode, Roam Research, Google Calendar, Google Tasks… Notion is by far my favorite of those. You can use it from your phone, sync is transparent, there’s an API, you can have multiple views of the same dataset… Lots to love about it and it keeps improving.
• HoneySQL · I wrote lots of big SQL queries this year. The HoneySQL library for Clojure made query composition straightforward in a way string building or even HugSQL couldn't be.
• Caddy · I like small VPSs and have done a mix of nginx and Let’s Encrypt / certbot to host my website and personal projects since forever. certbot makes your nginx files look ugly, and I don’t love the nginx syntax. Caddy manages SSL certs for you and has a nice syntax. It’s easy to use locally and has good docs.
• Ultorg · A SQL GUI that lets you quickly visualize JOINs, GROUP BYs. Take a look at the 10 minute demo from HYTRADBOI 2022 if you’re curious. I use it daily.
• Radix UI, Radix Themes · My favorite way to build React web UIs so far with both prestyled and bring-your-own-stylesheets. Handles all the tricky positioning and accessibility concerns.
• macOS Pomodoro Timer · A floating countdown timer widget. Very simple, but also beautifully done. Open-source. Get it here.
• Temporal · Began using this… distributed systems resiliency patterns toolbox? It does a lot. It’s hard to describe! Very happy with it so far at work.
• Markwhen · I had to put together a timeline for a post-mortem and this had a fine-grained resolution that the Notion timeline view doesn’t. Really easy to use too. The OneView mode is fantastic.
• CSS for JS Developers · CSS is ubiquitous, fiddling with it half-knowing what you’re doing gets frustrating. This is a fantastic course that had the right amount of detail for me.
• Programming in Haskell · Wanted to get a taste of static typing after many years of being on the other side. Didn’t expect I’d like this book as much as I did.

Book reading

• Herakles, Ajax, Prometheus Bound, The Trachiniae
• The Odyssey