Projects

why not use Electron? A few days ago I gave a talk at the Clojure Meetup Berlin about building GUIs with Clojure and JavaFX. Here is the abstract: Building declarative GUIs with Clojure, JavaFX and fn-fx (Dr. Nils Blum-Oeste) JavaFX is the current standard GUI framework included in most Java distributions and the successor to Swing. It is readily available via interop to any Clojure developer. I would like to give an introduction to an alternative approach using halgari/fn-fx: A thin Clojure wrapper around JavaFX by Timothy Baldrige that allows building GUIs declaratively from a single application state atom instead of dealing with the mutable JavaFX objects directly. ...

As I am in the process of developing an application for data analysis on chemical data the need for building a desktop GUI came up. Why desktop you ask? Excellent question! I think for this particular project, the combination of ease of use, data privacy and performance make it worth exploring an approach with a local, self-contained application instead of anything involving remote servers. Actually in the end we might build a SaaS too or move to such a model completely. ...

Recently I got some interest in generative “art”. Without going into what qualifies as art and what not, here are some of the things I created: Generative Art with Processing Generative Art with Processing Generative Art with Processing Generative Art with Processing Generative Art with Processing Generative Art with Processing Generative Art with Processing Generative Art with Processing The code generating these images is available on github over here. Try them live, as a couple of these images are from actual animations. ...

A few weeks ago Christoph and I gave an introduction to MicroServices at Futurice’s Beer&Tech sessions in Berlin. The idea was to collect our impressions from the DevOps conference 2015 in Berlin. I think we covered a lot of ground here from business value to technology and some simple live examples. The tools we introduced to were Docker, Consul and Prometheus and how to glue them together easily. As part of giving this talk, I developed a small playground with the mentioned technologies. I already blogged briefly about this project called “MS-KOS”. The live coding examples can be found on Github: MS-KOS ...

Recently I had the chance to be a coach at ClojureBridge Berlin. You might not have heard about this event before, but maybe you know RailsBridge. ClojureBridge’s mission is: ClojureBridge aims to increase diversity within the Clojure community by offering free, beginner-friendly Clojure programming workshops for women. Of course I did not hesitate to volunteer for that. I have to admit though, that I also had a hidden agenda: I wanted to test the hypothesis, that a LISP (Clojure in this case) is well suited to get started with programming. When talking to experienced developers about Clojure, I often have to face a negative reaction towards LISPs, sometimes also about (mostly) pure Functional Programming (less these days, as FP is so hip again). When I told some colleagues, including some with a formal computer science education as well as way more experienced devs that me, that I am going to help programming beginners to get started by using Clojure, they most often asked back if this is some kind of sadistic prank. ...

A while ago I did a small introduction to building a simple REST API with Clojure from scratch at Futurice in Berlin. While preparing that, I did create a small tutorial and demo project to follow along ( GitHub, Tutorial). The presentation was recorded on video and you can check it out right now, right here: [embed]https://vimeo.com/125578412[/embed] Feedback, as well as pull requests are highly appreciated. The tutorial is not complete yet and has some glitches here and there I guess. However, I already got feedback, that I was a good starting point for multiple people without previous Clojure experience. Thanks Nils ...

As a demo for a talk my colleague Christoph and I gave at Futurice, also visited by students from HPI, I put together a small playground for creating and managing Micro Services. It’s work in progress, but usable already and might be a good starting point if you would like to try out your own setup with Docker, Consul and Prometheus. The actual nice thing is, that it’s basically just a collection of Docker CLI commands. Nice images are available already, I just threw in a super simple Clojure Service. ...

Who doesn’t know about having too many projects at hand? Guess I am not different, probably rather on the more excessive side of things here. Having finished my PhD and getting some personal issues sorted out, I feel having capacity and the drive to get my hands dirty again. Among the things I already started are some Clojure open source contributions, game experiments and a few other things. However, I felt this is a good opportunity to put a collection of projects on my website. ...