Books I read (January - August 2016)

January
- El Eternauta, Héctor Germán Oesterheld and Francisco Solano López
- Barcelona. Los vagabundos de la chatarra, Jorge Carrión and Sagar Fornies
- Rip Van Winkle, Washington Irving
- La guerra interminable (The Forever War), Joe Haldeman
- Maintanable JavaScript, Nicholas C. Zakas
- Ve y pon un centinela (Go Set a Watchman), Harper Lee
- El nombre del viento (The Name of the Wind), Patrick Rothfuss
- You Don't Know JS: Async & Performance, Kyle Simpson
- Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari
- The Principles of Object Oriented JavaScript, Nicholas C. Zakas

February
- The Leprechauns of Software Engineering, Laurent Bossavit
- The Wise Man's Fear, Patrick Rothfuss
- Fundamentals of Object-Oriented Design in UML, Meilir Page-Jones
- Old Man's War, John Scalzi
- Cevdet Bey e hijos (Cevdet Bey ve Oğulları), Orhan Pamuk
- Ringworld, Larry Niven
- Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson

March
- The Grumpy Programmer's Guide To Building Testable PHP Applications, Chris Hartjes
- The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
- The Coding Dojo Handbook, Emily Bache
- Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury

April
- Implementation Patterns, Kent Beck (3rd time)
- The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, Charles Duhigg
- How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie
- Understanding the Four Rules of Simple Design, Corey Haines (2nd time)
- La llamada de Cthulhu (The Call of Cthulhu), El horror de Dunwich (The Dunwich Horror) and Las ratas en las paredes (The Rats in the Walls), H. P. Lovecraft
- The Tales of Beedle the Bard, J. K. Rowling

May
- The Slow Regard of Silent Things, Patrick Rothfuss
- Building Microservices, Designing Fine-Grained Systems, Sam Newman
- Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl
- Manifiesto del Partido Comunista (Das Kommunistiche Manifest), K. Marx and F. Engels
- Web Development with Clojure, Build Bulletproof Web Apps with Less Code, Dimitri Sotnikov
- Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, Martin Fowler
- The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, Atul Gawande
- How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life, Scott Adams

June
- Pragmatic Thinking and Learning, Refactor Your Wetware, Andy Hunt
- Testable JavaScript, Mark Ethan Trostler
- The Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to Giving & Getting Advice Successfully, Gerald M. Weinberg
- La desfachatez intelectual. Escritores e intelectuales ante la política, Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca
- REST in Practice, Jim Webber, Savas Parastatidis and Ian Robinson
- Mindset, Carol Dweck

July
- The Call of the Wild, Jack London
- Weinberg on Writing: The Fieldstone Method, Gerald M. Weinberg
- Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Anne Tyler
- How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method, G. Polya
- Object Oriented Software Engineering: A Use Case Driven Approach, Ivar Jacobson
- A Far Cry from Kensington, Muriel Spark

August
- The Difference Engine, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling
- Clojure Applied, From Practice to Practitioner, Ben Vandgrift and Alex Miller
- Vampir, Joann Sfar
- Los mares del Sur, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán
- El océano al final del camino (The Ocean at the End of the Lane), Neil Gaiman
- La Guerra Civil Española, Paul Preston and José Pablo García
- Wiser: Getting Beyond Groupthink to Make Groups Smarter, Cass R. Sunstein and Reid Hastie

MOOCs: Machine Learning on Coursera

I recently finished this wonderful Coursera course by Andrew Ng of Stanford University:

• Machine Learning

I really enjoyed the course. It was very interesting. Andrew Ng did a great job introducing machine learning, data mining, and statistical pattern recognition.

I would like to thank Coursera and Andrew Ng for this great course!

Kata: Variation on Lights Out, flipping behavior on the backend

Lately, in Clojure Developers Barcelona's events, we've been practicing by doing several variations on the Lights Out Kata.

First, we did the kata in ClojureScript using Reagent and Figwheel (described in this previous post).

In the last two meetups (this one and this other one), we redid the kata.

This time instead of doing everything on the client, we used the Compojure library to develop a back end service that reset and flipped the lights, and a simple client that talked to it using cljs-http and core.async libraries.

As we've been doing lately, we did mob programming and REPL-driven development.

First, let's see the code we did for the server:

These are the tests:

and this is the definition of the routes and their handlers using Compojure:

We had some problems with the Same-origin policy until we discovered and learned how to use the Ring middleware for Cross-Origin Resource Sharing.

Finally, this is the code that flips and resets the lights (it's more or less the same code we wrote for the client-only version of the kata we did previously):


Now, let's see the code we wrote for the client:

First, the core namespace where everything is initialized (notice the channel creation on line 12):

Then the lights-view namespace which contains the code to render all the components:

The lights-view's code is also very similar to the one we did for the client-only version of the kata.

And finally the lights namespace which is in charge of talking to the back end and updating the lights atom:

Notice how we used the pipe function to take the values that were coming from the channel returned by the call to cljs-httphttps://github.com/r0man/cljs-http's post function and pass them to the channel from which the code that updates the lights state is taking values.

You can find the code we produced in these two GitHub repositories: the server and the client (see the flip-lights-in-backend branch).

As usual it was a great pleasure to do mob programming and learn with the members of Clojure Developers Barcelona.

MOOCs: Networking for Web Developers on Udacity

I recently finished this Udacity course:

• Networking for Web Developers

I found it very interesting. I did it, mainly, because I'd like to start filling some gaps in my knowledge about the stack of networking protocols under the hood of HTTP.

After the course, I've started to read Ilya Grigorik's High Performance Browser Networking book bit by bit.

Thanks a million Udacity!

Interesting Talk: "Taming Asynchronous Workflows with Functional Reactive Programming"

I've just watched this great talk by Leonardo Borges

• Taming Asynchronous Workflows with Functional Reactive Programming

You can find the slides here.

Kata: Lights Out in ClojureScript using Reagent and Figwheel

In a recent Clojure Developers Barcelona event we did the Lights Out Kata in ClojureScript using Reagent (a minimalistic ClojureScript interface to React.js) and Figwheel (which builds your ClojureScript code and hot loads it into the browser as you are coding).

We did mob programming and REPL-driven development.

Once at home I went on working on the kata.

This is the resulting code:

First, the core namespace where everything is initialized:

The lights-view namespace which contains the code to render all the components:

Finally, the lights namespace which contains all the business logic:

You can check all the code in the everything-in-client branch of this GitHub repository.

As usual it was a great pleasure to do mob programming with the members of Clojure Developers Barcelona.

Thanks!

Kata: Bank Account in Clojure using outside-in TDD with Component and Midje

I did the Printing Account Statement subset of the Bank Account kata in Clojure using Component and Midje.

I started the kata in a Barcelona Clojure Developers event.

The truth is that, since I was learning how to use the Component library, I didn't use TDD.

Instead I worked on the REPL to get everything in place and make it work.

Then I wrote the tests I would have liked to write if I had used outside-in TDD with Midje.

I find that, when I'm learning something new, it works better for me what Brian Marick describes in these tweets:

(6) the immediately-following writing of tests to capture what I've learned counts as Schön-style reflection on just-prior practice.

— Brian Marick (@marick) July 26, 2016

Now I'll show you the tests I actually wrote afterwards, in the order I would have written them doing outside-in TDD.

This is the acceptance test I would have started with:

Then I would have written this unit test for Account:

And these are the ones for InMemoryTransactions, ConsoleStatementPrinter and NiceReverseStatementFormat:

You can check the rest of the tests and code in this GitHub repository.

Doing this kata I learned and practiced how to use Component.

I also learned how to use Midje's defrecord-openly and provided macros to mock protocols which helped me correct something I did wrong in another kata.

Interesting Talk: "Turning the database inside out with Apache Samza"

I've just watched this very interesting talk by Martin Kleppmann

• Turning the database inside out with Apache Samza

Interesting Paper: "'Claro!': An Essay on Discursive Machismo"

I've just read this wonderful paper by Diego Gambetta

• "Claro!": An Essay on Discursive Machismo

this great paper talks about how "Claro!" attitudes in communication, "characterized by strong opinions on everything from the outset of discussion", and the set of beliefs about knowledge behind them can make impossible to get to positive results in group deliberative processes.

A very interesting concept I got to know through Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca's La desfachatez intelectual. Escritores e intelectuales ante la política book.

Unfortunately, "Claro!" attitudes are widespread in our culture...

Interesting Talk: "Doing data science with Clojure: the ugly, the sad, the joyful,"

I've just watched this interesting talk by Simon Belak

• Doing data science with Clojure: the ugly, the sad, the joyful,