I’ve been meaning to get back to writing for a while now. I find that a lot of what I’d like to share is too small for a blog post and a little too long-winded for Twitter. As such I’ve started a Newsletter that I think fits the bill.

This newsletter will primarity focus of leadership and technology, with a few life and current events thrown in for good measure. It will be published fortnightly initially but that may change.

Recently I wrote an internal blog post at work titled On the traps of working from home.

While the content isn’t new it was triggered by the recent events around COVID-19 and the fact that all of a sudden the whole company was working from home, distributed across multiple timezones.

I was worried that we may default to having more meetings instead of better communication and writing this post was my attempt to share how I tend to deal with distractions.

I recently wrote an article on our company blog where I explained how we evaluate Machine Learning models at RecordPoint – if you haven’t read it yet, I’d recommend you do so before proceeding.

Since its publishing, I received a number of comments asking me to clarify the concepts presented with concrete examples.

The original article is light on code by design as the audience for the company blog isn’t always that technical. Therefore, in this post I’ll provide a simple example that will hopefully clear things up – in particular why accuracy isn’t enough.

Early last week I had the chance to attend the Symposium on Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology organised by UNSW. I wasn’t aware that UNSW was so heavily involved in the community until this event and have since learned about their interest group which has been going on for a while.

The talks had a healthy mix of research and industry case studies with subjects ranging from the technical challenges of current blockchain implementations to the legal implications of distributed ledger technology.

If you haven’t yet, make sure you read my summary of Day 1 first.

Morning Panel

Day 2 started with a morning panel with:

• Paul Fox from Blockchain.capital
• Leon Gerard Vandenberg from RightsFusion Pty Ltd & Solara
• Oliver Harvey from ASIC
• Ross Buckley from UNSW Law

The panelists took turns in giving their views around blockchain, investments and regulation, leading into a Q&A at the end. I was running late to this session and believe I may have missed Ross’ individual slot.

A year and four months ago I joined Atlassian to pursue a very exciting opportunity: to deliver realtime collaborative editing to Confluence. I have talked about it last year at EuroClojure and this year at QCon Brazil. Even Cognitect wrote a few words about it.

In a nutshell this involved writing Clojure code all day to build an awesome service we call Synchrony. Synchrony is capable of realtime data synchronisation - not just collaborative editing - and as such its applications are many! This has been proven again and again internally during the Atlassian ShipIt hackatons, and externally via Enso.me, which is powered by Synchrony.

In the beginning

Nearly 4 years ago I founded the Sydney Clojure User Group. I had been playing with Clojure for a little while and started a small study group to learn more. Initially this group was private and held at the ThoughtWorks office.

After a couple of meetups and conversations I decided to open up the group to the public and then realised we weren’t the only ones interested in Clojure and, even more important, interested in meeting like-minded people, share experiences and help each other.

I should have published this post still in 2015 but as I was on holidays traveling around Australia I didn’t really have the time to do it. Better late than never, right? (also Linode - the provider hosting this site - has been under a severe DDoS attack so the site just came back up today)

2015 has been a unusually quiet year in this blog. Thankfully that is because I have been extremely busy in many other areas. I’d like to take the opportunity and look back at 2015’s highlights.

I’m extremely happy to let everyone know my book, Clojure Reactive Programming, has finally been published!

You can get it at the publisher’s website or on Amazon. I had a great time writing it and I truly hope you find it useful!

I’ve met a few authors here and there and I heard more than once that a book is never really finished. I now know what they mean.

The book doesn’t cover everything I wanted to write about due to time and space limitations. Having said that, now that the book is out I do plan to expand on a few things using this blog.

Another year is about to end and as it is tradition in this blog it’s time to look at the year’s highlights!

Functional Programming

I have been advocating Functional Programming and Clojure for a while now and 2014 has been good to me. It was the first year where I was paid to work almost entirely in functional languages. Most of it was in Scala and a little less in Clojure.