Posts

I released MotoFlow in 2025 - a native Apple app for motorcycle ride tracking. As a rider myself, I built the app I always wanted but couldn’t find. MotoFlow runs natively on iPhone, Apple Watch, and Mac. The macOS app is a full native Mac application for managing your ride library, browsing routes on a large screen, and integrating photos that automatically map to your journeys. One-tap recording on iPhone or Apple Watch, then review and organize everything on your Mac. ...

In 2025 I built and released DrumFlow - a pattern generator for handpan and tongue drum players on iPhone and iPad. I got into handpan music a while ago and found myself constantly looking for new patterns and rhythms to try. The problem with random generation is that it usually sounds terrible - just notes without musical coherence. So I built something that generates patterns using motif-based composition: it creates a short musical phrase and develops it, producing rhythms that actually sound good and work well with the instrument. ...

A few years ago and wouldn’t have thought to get to this point, but here we are: In less than two weeks I am going to release my first single to streaming platforms globally and a full album is in the pipeline too! While I worked hard on becoming a metal guitar player and starting bands when I was younger, the adventure came to an end at some point at university. You know, learning, profession, academia and other stuff got in the way. ...

On March 1st, 2020 the “Audible Side Effects” will come to town! This is an event I am organising as a satellite event to the :clojureD conference. We will use Clojure to work on any kind of music or sound project. This could be sound design and synthesis, algorithmic composition or whatever else comes to your mind. If you would like to join and meet, please sign up at http://bit.ly/ase-2020!

At this year’s EuroClojure I gave a talk about probabilistic programming with Clojure, using the Anglican probabilistic programming system. Abstract: Probabilistic Programming Systems aim to merge general purpose programming with probabilistic modelling. They provide powerful statistical inference and thus allow developers to focus on the modelling with tools and environments they are comfortable with. These emerging methods are promising additions to the Data Scientist’s toolbox and an interesting, satisfying playground for programming enthusiasts. This talk is an introduction to Probabilistic Programming Systems, their use and value for the industry and Clojure’s great library “Anglican”. ...

I was interviewed by PurelyFuntional.tv about my upcoming talk Intro to Probabilistic Programming and Clojure’s Anglican at EuroClojure 2017. You can find the full interview here: https://purelyfunctional.tv/speaker-interview/nils-blum-oeste-euroclojure-2017-interview/

The Art of Manliness podcast (I know, just try to ignore the name, I don’t like it either) has this great episode with Kevin Kelly (Wired, Whole Earth Catalogue) about the next big things in tech. Check it out: The Art of Manliness: #267: The Technological Forces That Are Shaping Our World

Here is a quick introduction to style your Clojure JavaFX application via CSS using the garden library. Intro I am still working on a desktop application built with Clojure and fn-fx and I am making good progress, pretty happy with it so far. When I gave a talk about it at the Clojure meetup Berlin, I was asked about how it looks. Well it might not be spectacular, but I was actually quite happy with the default look of it. Yeah, despite being a Java app! It might be hard to be believe when you still remember the stuff from the 90s and 00s, but check it out yourself: ...

The cloud might not be a sustainable model for handling computation in massive IoT scenarios. Instead lots of the data processing might need to be done close to the devices. Resources, efficiency and latency are reasons where such a system “on the edge” might be beneficial or even a hard requirement. A very interesting topic! A great introduction is this episode of the Software Engineering Daily podcast with Peter Levine: The End of Cloud Computing with Peter Levine. Peter also has a talk about the very topic. ...

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. ...