Alda for Clojurists

A more FP-friendly Alda Just recently, I rewrote a big chunk of the Alda codebase; the result is something I’m a lot happier with, as a Clojure programmer. Clojure is a language that encourages programming in a functional style, minimizing the need to keep track of the state of variables and re... (more)

Alda: A Music Programming Language Built With Clojure

I gave this talk about Alda a few months ago as part of Clojure Remote, the world’s first remote-only Clojure conference. This talk serves as a quick introduction to music programming languages and the philosophy that led me to create Alda. I talk a little bit about what Alda is and a few of th... (more)

Vignettes: Vimwiki, HTTPie, jq

I tried this once before and it was pretty fun. I continue to find and use awesome things (the internet has many of them), so here are a few more things I’ve been enjoying lately. Vimwiki I think keeping a personal wiki is a great way to organize your life. It’s like the digital equivale... (more)

moar no love videos!!!

I haven’t been diligent about posting stuff about No Love, the band I play drums in. So here’s a handful of videos I found on YouTube – enjoy! 6/20/15: Rock 'n Roll Party Fest I 9/2015: Hopscotch 2015 4/1/16: Full set at a house in Raleigh For those of you in the Triangle area, we h... (more)

Alda Has a Bunch of New Features

Three months ago, I wrote a blog post introducing the music programming language Alda and walking through the basics of using it to write a musical score. To my amazement and delight, my blog post went mildly viral on Reddit and Hacker News, bringing about a spike in activity on GitHub. I’m tha... (more)

Getting Your First Programming Job: Not as Hard as You Think

Today marks my one-year anniversary of working at Adzerk, which also means I have now been working professionally as a software developer for one year. I could not be happier to be programming for a living, and I’m still not really over the fact that it was as easy as it was for me to break into... (more)

Something Cool That Happened Every Month of My Life: 2010

Quite often, I think about what I was doing exactly 5 or 10 years ago. I think about what bands I was playing in, where I was living, what my interests were then, how I felt, which people I spent the most time with. As individuals, we are constantly re-inventing ourselves, transitioning in and o... (more)

Alda: A Manifesto and Gentle Introduction

What is Alda? Alda’s ambition is to be a powerful and flexible music programming language that can be used to create music in a variety of genres by typing some code into a text editor and running a program that compiles the code and turns it into sound. I’ve put a lot of thought into making ... (more)

Making MIDI Sound Awesome in a Clojure Program

I wrote a couple months ago about MIDI and the JVM. I explained that Gervill has been the JVM’s built-in soft synth since Java 7, and I mentioned that there are two ways that Gervill allows you to load SoundFont files, changing the way the General MIDI instruments sound on your computer. You can... (more)

Vignettes: Vim, Fish Shell, Amethyst

I’ve been exploring all sorts of awesome things lately. I feel compelled to share the magic™ of these things with you, but to be fair, there are already a ton of great blog posts and tutorials out there about each of these things, and I’m not sure there’s much more that I could say that hasn’t a... (more)