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Journalλ︎

A journal of thoughts and experiences from commercial work and community projects 🌐 powered by Material for MkDocs

Practical.li provides free online books covering practical guides to Clojure programming and development workflows. Practicalli Engineering Playbook contains specific guides across the full spectrum of software development.

Sponsor Practicalli

All sponsorship funds are used to support the continued development of Practicalli series of books and videos, although most work is done at personal expense and time.

Thanks to 🌐 Cognitect, 🌐 Nubank and Practicalli GitHub sponsors from the community for your continued support

Organising Practicalli boards

The week started with a Bank Holiday Monday and I was still sleepy after the 100km ride on Sunday. As I was too low on energy for Practialli work, I did lots of chores instead.

A search showed me how to correctly create Markdown comments which are supported by todo comments. The todo comments help me track work that needs to be done within markdown files.

Started watching Star Wars The Bad Bad animated series from scratch as I hadn't seen it for a while and I hadn't seen season 3 at all yet. Season 3 is the final one for this show. I really like this show as it has some interesting characters and stories. The storyline starts where Star Wars The Clone Wars animated series finishes, from the issue of Oder 66 that brings the Jedi order to an end.

My Bose Quiet Comfort earbuds died last week. The left earbud is now flashing red and white which means it cant connect the right eadbud (the main controller). I've tried rebooting it several times but without success.

Bose support will offer me a small discount on the Bose Quiet Elite earbuds if I send my faulty earbuds back. However this apparently takes about a month before I would get the new earbuds. Not a nice experience having to wait that long.

I do have some smaller Bose earbuds that work pretty well. I may shop around and probably try the Sony earbuds next time to see if they last longer.

Clojure REPL IntelliJ plugin & LazyVim Config for Neovim

Very tired this week, probably from all the exercise in the last two weeks catching up to me. After taking it easy and catching up with various Star Wars series I started to have a lot more energy by the weekend.

LazyVim is another community configuration for Neovim, its quite nice out of the box and has a 'Clojure extras' with Conjure support.

Looking for an icon to represent a project maintainer, I browsed through the GitHub Octodex that contains a wide variety of Octocat design images.

Backing up the last couple of projects on the Lenovo Extreme and will give ... a quick try before installing Debian Linux.

IntelliJ IDEA editor hasnt been on my radar for a long time until a friend reached out via Clojurians slack about the Clojure REPL and Clojure LSP plugins for Intellij. These open source plugins are a very interesting alternative to the commercial Cursive plugin. I took IntelliJ and these new plugins for a quick test run and liked the results.

Its self-assessment time and hopefully I can get a little tax back from the UK government, expecially as I did a nice pension contribution and didnt work a full tax year.

My local Co-op has been very short of supplies for the last few of weeks, something I havent seen since the UK left the European Union. Reading the result of the Co-op annual general meeting there was a link to 🌐 message from the CEO about a Cyber Incident.

It seems the Co-op systems were hacked and deliveries to Co-op stores were greatly affected, so there were very few products on the shelves. Deliveries have apparently resumed now, although I have enjoyed walking down to Waitrose instead.

I did another order for organic hemp seeds, walnuts, peauts, jumbo oats and dried apricots from 🌐 Forest Whole Foods.

Volunteering at Devoxx

Updated the command line prompt to ⚓ Starship.rs due to an ⚓ issue with Powerline10k.

Starship works very well and is fairly simple to configure using a ~/.config/starship.toml file. There is a 🌐 Catppuccin Powerline Preset (theme) that was customised to move some information onto the right-hand side of the prompt and tweaked some of the default Catppuccin Mocha colors.

Practicalli Customisation of catppuccin-powerline preset

MkDocs is used for all Practicalli websites and something has changed so that ⚓ running a local website fails to build. This does make using MkDocs a little more fiddly to use. If I dont use embedded files in a code block then everything seems okay again.

This week I have been volunteering at ⚓ Devoxx UK in London. Tuesday was setting up activates for the event, such as building video game cabinets. Wednesday and Thursday was room monitor, ensuring the speakers and attendees are taken care of. The room monitor also captures feedback about the event back to the conference organisers (so they can continue optimising the conference for next year).

Preparing Neovim Config release

Preparing the first major release of Practicalli nvim-astro5

Submitted 4 pull requests to Astrocommunity last week, to support the new config and keep it nice and light.

Received a request to add Babashka file support to Practicalli nvim-astro5

For some user acceptance testing work I did a few weeks ago, I received a nice sized Amazon gift card. To give me more ways to keep healthy, I spent some of the money on parts and upgrades to my Brompton folding bike.

Older and wiser

After last weeks experiments with Neovim 0.11 and AstroNvim version 5, it was time to put together the new nvim-astro5 configuration. The AstroNvim 5 based config is even simpler with fewer lines of code than current AstroNvim 4 config.

AstroNvim has replaced many plugins with Snacks and it feels even more responsive to use and more visually appealing. I've also updated the theme to Catppuccin (Cat Pussin') for Neovim and Kitty terminal app for a nice consistency.

There will be some significant changes to add to the Practicalli Neovim book as the content migrates to use Practicalli nvim-astro5 configuration. So as to not disrupt users of Practicalli Astro (based on AstroNvim 4) I will use a separate git branch and publish initially to Practicalli Neovim Staging site.

Once the Practicalli nvim-astro5 configuration is feature compatible and has proven itself stable, I will push all the updates to Practicalli Neovim

Firstly, I had to create a staging website and workflow to publish from a seperate branch (or a pull request) for a book created with Material for MkDocs. A staging site was used for the Practicalli blog generated by Cryogen and pushed to a separate repository (GitHub Org token added for accessing a different repository).

TODO: Relesed Practicalli nvim-astro5

DOING: are there meaningful icon for linking to GitHub issues, pull requests and and projects? Other than the generic GitHub icon

Material for MkDocs Icons & Emoji page has a search across all icons and emojis available. Potential icons include:

  • - Octicons issue open
  • - Octicons issue closed
  • 🎫 - a ticket
  • 🎟 - tickets (like ticket but red)
  • - a project board

Updating to Neovim 0.11 on Arch Linux was unexpectedly challenging and was an opportunity to look into package mirrors. It seems some mirrors are not updating as regularly as they could. Further investigation into the best mirrors to use for my geographical region seems valuable.

Contributions:

Hello Sunshine

Neovim 0.11 was released last week along with AstroNvim 5, so its time for some testing with Practicalli Astro configuration for Neovim.

A sunny week ahead and my focus will be on health and fitness this week. I have managed to be regular with my walking, although I am still very slow when cycling (especially the hills of Kent).

I have been using LinkedIn to consider the next steps in my career. Unless there is a really interesting role, I am tempted to focus more on community work or maybe part-time / contract work.

End of the tax year in UK

Its the end of the tax year in the UK in a few weeks, so I have been busy ensuring I maximise my pension contributions. I am able to make a significant pension contribution this tax year (and hopefully get a nice repayment via self-assessment later in the year).

I am still interested in using Hyprland (and many related packages) for a tiling desktop environment with excellent UX. I came across Garuda Linux with has many kinds of editions, one being Hyprland.

Practicalli rising

Really getting into the swing of working full time on Practicalli educational content again.

Applied for funding from Clojurists Together for a new Clojure Stacks project and for updating Practical.li content. I've been tidying up the very many tickets across the project issues across the Practicalli GitHub Org.

I created a new GitHub project for Clojurists Together Funding and discovered interesting new features of GitHub projects.

After a report on a compromised GitHub action, I restricted the GitHub action policy for the Practicalli GitHub Org. Unfortunately the liquidz/antq-runner GitHub action is not by a certified Organisation, so is blocked from running unless I add an explicit exception.

reClojure 2025 has been announced for 26th May 2025, this time an in-person event. Strangely this is a Bank Holiday in the UK, so travelling could be 'interesting'.

Unlike previous reClojure conferences, this is a paid event costing 75 GBP. With the event being on a Bank Holiday I am unlikely to attend as I'll be riding with the local cycling club or other long distance event.

Updating Neovim on Termux

After a lovely sunny weekend its back to grey and chilly outside. Later in the week it was sunny but really cold (freezing overnight).

Lots of updating software and tools this week, including

Backup continues for the Lenovo X1 Extreme laptop which is running an old Ubuntu and will have Debian Linux soon.

In the Clojurians Slack community, a post in news-and- channel highlighted a security risk to the tj-actions GitHub action. I dont use this GitHub action, but as a measure of caution I configured a more restrictive policy for running GitHub actions in the Practicalli Org.