Minutiae #4: Strange Loop talk, git submodules

Polishing my Strange Loop talk With Strange Loop drawing closer, I’ve been spending most of my free time tweaking and practicing my talk about the dynamic relationship between Alda and Clojure. As I tend to do, I planned way too much material and so I ending up having to trim down the sections... (more)

Minutiae #3: alda-clj lightning demo, weather data, Seven Languages in Seven Weeks

alda-clj lightning demo As I mentioned in my last blog post, I had the pleasure of attending the Heart of Clojure conference in Belgium this month. Somebody suggested that I give a 5-minute lightning talk about Alda, so I signed up at the last minute and (after some hasty preparation) gave a qu... (more)

Minutiae #2: Crux, slideshow tools, Asciidoc, Heart of Clojure

Here’s some stuff I’ve been spending time on lately: Crux tutorial The UK-based Clojure consulting company JUXT recently released Crux, an open source, bitemporal, document-oriented database. I thought it was interesting when I heard about it, but I haven’t had a good opportunity to try it out... (more)

Minutiae #1: Alda stuff, Clojure tooling for Vim

I’ve been meaning to update this blog more often for a long time now. The problem I have is that I have a lot of interesting things that I could write about, but I feel like it would take so much effort to produce a blog post worth reading, I just never have the time to do it. As a result, I’ve ... (more)

Out of the Blue

In January 2019, I collaborated with my wife, choreographer Renay Aumiller, to create a modern dance piece called Out of the Blue. I wrote a program that prompted the audience to contribute a list of body parts and dance qualities, and then fed that creative input into an algorithm to randomly g... (more)

A Music Composition Language With a Functional Backbone

A couple months ago, I was fortunate enough to be invited to speak about Alda at the Compose::Melbourne conference in Australia! Compose is a conference all about functional programming as it pertains to professionals, academics and hobbyists alike. The conference was great and I had a fantastic... (more)

Exit Mice and an ode to grunge pop

Hello, I started a new band called Exit Mice! It’s always exciting to start a new musical project, and this one is no exception. We just released our debut EP (which you can listen to below) and we’ll be playing our first show this Thursday, July 5, at The Pour House in Raleigh. If you’re in the... (more)

Taskwarrior, where have you been all my life?

I’ve been thinking a lot about task management lately. I’ve actually been thinking about it for years. I’ve always been searching for the optimal way to sort through the bajillion things I have to do and remain productive. This all started when, as a programmer, I realized that I had the ... (more)

A History of the Architecture of Alda

In my last blog post, I talked about an important evolution in the implementation of alda.lisp, a sort of DSL or “mini-language” that represents a musical score and compiles down to data that can be interpreted and performed by Alda’s sound engine. In this post, I’ll discuss another way i... (more)

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)