Episode 8: Phil Hagelberg; empowering userspace in Heroku, Leiningen, and Emacs

Mostly λazy…a Clojure podcast

Phil Hagelberg (a.k.a. technomancy just about everywhere) has been a constant presence in the Clojure world for years. Best known for starting the Leiningen project — which he continues to maintain as part of his duties at Heroku — Phil has had his fingers in all sorts of open source pots, including Clojure itself, a big pile of Clojure libraries, and the packaging and distribution infrastructure around Emacs (thus foreshadowing Leiningen to a certain degree?).

We talked about many of these topics (recorded on 8/31/2012, BTW), but one theme that kept coming up throughout our conversation was the notion of empowering userspace; that is, ensuring that users of a system have nearly (or exactly?) as much power available to them as the system’s original creators. This is something that Phil has written about recently, where he dubbed a particular approach to empowering userspace as the “Emacs Way”…a strategy that has yielded great dividends in Leiningen and Clojure both.

Enjoy!

Listen:

http://downloads.mostlylazy.com/episodes/mostly-lazy-008.mp3

Or, download the mp3 directly.

Discrete Topics

• Many questions and topics came from tweets to @MostlyLazy (watch for scheduled show announcements and send us topics and questions!)
• Heroku stuffs, including:
  • Mark McGranahan gave a talk at the Clojure Conj last year on “Logs as Data” (inspired by Pulse, a Clojure system for consuming log streams at Heroku)
  • Buildpacks, the way projects and apps deployed to Heroku are built
• Sonian
• The Leiningen survey, which aimed to get a snapshot of how people use the tool
• Scripting Gnome 3 with ClojureScript
• “The Great Samsung Laptop Fiasco of 2012”
• “Ending is better than mending” (or not?)
• Common tools for code pairing / swarming: screen & tmux
• “Emacs is a great operating system; if only it had a decent text editor…”
• nREPL, and the Emacs support for it, nrepl.el
• Gobby, a free collaborative editor
• A Leiningen and Clojars status update
• The potential vulnerability of builds that rely upon remote / third-party artifact repositories
• Maximizing community participation in open source projects
• “Pull requests aren’t a joking matter, people!”
• Empowering userspace, i.e. extending systems in the same way and language used to build the system itself viz. “the Emacs way”
• Phil’s current reading list:
  • The Lady Tasting Tea (“a pop-sci take on how statistics has influenced science”)
  • True Names (“sci-fi precursor to cyberpunk”)
• The extensibility and flexibility of the Heroku / buildpack model
  • OCaml, Factor, Haskell, elisp, and even buildpacks for NES roms
  • “Making sure we can push it to the limits” of maximizing the leverage available to users within the system.