Clojure world is lucky to have HugSQL - brilliant library which makes daily work with SQLs a real pleasure. HugSql decouples queries from the code, so they do not interfere with content of .clj files and transforms (interns into a namespace) queries to plain clojure functions. Functions created this way are quite smart - underlaying magic connects to postgres, sqlite or whatever DB keeps your data (and is supported by JDBC) and runs defined query with provided function arguments.

Focus is one of those additions which turns Emacs usage into real joy and makes programmer’s life happier. Having to look at tons of code 8 hrs per day might become a bit painful. Readable font is often first choice to improve this situation but it doesn’t help much when one needs to focus on concrete block of code. This is where Focus comes to the rescue - it dims text outside the function pointed by cursor and visually brings that code block at user’s attention.

Maven or gradle? Grunt or gulp? Leiningen or boot…? It doesn’t matter whether you’re a front- or back-end dev, sooner or later you have to complete your toolbox and choose a right hammer for the right nail. The problem is, all these tools in our ever changing programming world rotate so fast and details between them become so subtle that you’re barely able to check all of them out, understand the philosophy behind and take a reasonable decision.

It takes a few days for beginner Emacs user to learn what’s the difference between windows and frames. Then usually next question arises: how to switch between multiple windows within same Emacs frame? The most obvious way is to use mouse/touchpad of course. It’s easy at the beginning but horribly distracting in a long term. Emacs unfortunately doesn’t really help with its crazy default shortcuts. There is C-x o described as “select another window” which cycles through all available windows.

This is my initial blog note - first from series I’m going to write about one of the most innovative programming languages we can hear of nowadays - about Clojure. New incarnation of almost forgotten Lisp came back onto scene bending minds of thousands of programmers who suddenly discover again the joy of programming. Lot of arcticles have been already written about Clojure and why it’s so attractive. Not to repeat all of these oh’s and ah’s I would like to sum up things most important for me as a long-time professional java programmer:

Have you ever dreamed about changing the content displayed by your web browser straight from text editor? Latest Episode 11 at Emacs Rocks discovers how you may speed up your web development with awesome swank-js. Btw. if you still don’t have Emacs Rocks in your RSS reader, I highly recommend adding this source right now. It’s excellent place of tips & tricks especially helpful during daily work with emacs. What is swank-js?

I found a brilliant page, I’d like to share with you - TypeRacer - a place where you can measure your typing speed and compare it with other participants. One word of warning - it’s horribly addicting.

Javascript has undoubtedly its great time nowadays. Not only it is used by web browsers but also became popular as an efficient server side solution (just to mention node.js) for many performance problems. Along with javascript growth we could observe raise and fall of dedicated IDEs. Years ago when I started my adventure with javascript I had to choose between Aptana and (paid) IntelliJ Idea. All other editors either supported javascript poorly or didn’t support it at all.

Emacs isn’t only a best-class editor which offers you productivity boost for free. It’s also all-in-one environment which embeds most frequently used tools like console (eshell), irc (erc), news reader (gnus) and… well known “social” gadgets like gtalk and twitter. Yes, that means, you may communicate with friends and check your tweets not even leaving editor window. Let me show how to configure both. GTalk Gtalk bases on open protocol (jabber), so the only thing we need is a jabber client.

Finally, after few attempts I decided to move all my posts from tumblr blog to octopress. There were few reasons behind this decision: I like having entire blog under my own control. Octopress keeps whole the stuff under git which gives history of all changes, branches and tags. That’s really awesome for programmer like me. Hosting on github. There are not enough words to express how github revolutionized my daily workflow.