Community Update August June 2nd Half

After the broadcasts on Clojure spec, moving on to more tooling centric topics. Starting with Unit test runners for Clojure CLI tool and preparing a series on continuous integration, packaging and deployment.

Flu symptoms have finally eased, so planning video tutorials in the later part of the sponsorship.

Practicalli Study Group

Wrap up of Clojure spec series of 5 broad, sharing my experiences with spec along with feedback from many others in the community.

Broadcast on unit testing and test runners, focusing on Cognitect Labs test runner and Koacha from Lambda Island.

Practicalli Clojure

Updated and extended the Getting Started section, using rebel readline for the command line REPL UI. Added sections on configuriong Clojure CLI and provided a wide range of community tools and other useful aliases.

Wrote a new section on Clojure Spec and generative testing, covering how to design specifications (composite vs hierachical). Also discussed organising specifications and how they fit into a project and along side Test Driven Development (TDD) and REPL drive development (RDD).

Wrote section on Regular Expressions in Clojure. Added regular expressions for common string patterns, such as passwords, email addresses, etc.

Extended the Unit Testing section to cover useful practices with clojure.test library, refactor is assertions with are to work over data sets.

Added test runner section covering Cognitect Labs test runner and configuring categories of tests. Started a section on kaocha covering the basic use and configuration. This section to be extended as more projects are used with kaocha.

Configured git template to use live branch as the default branch name. The word master has never made any sense as a term in a distributed version control system.

Added :test-runner-cljs alias to practicalli/clojure-cli-config for the cljs-test-runner from Olical. A test runner inspired by Cognitect Labs test runner for Clojure.

Discussion regarding some defacto approaches and conventions for Clojure tools.deps projects, especially around the idea of naming of aliases. The practicalli/clojure-cli-config repository is an example of how 30+ aliases could be defined to provide the most common tooling for all tools.deps projects.

Practicalli ClojureScript

Clarified the introduction to the ClojureScript book status and surfaced the work that remains current and functional. This content includes and several reagent based projects, building and deploying a ClojureScript website for ClojureBridge and creating a TicTacToe game with Scalable Vector Graphics.

Depreciated content developed several years ago, as much has changed in the ClojureScript world since then. The older content is still available and will be updated during July 2020 and onward.

Practicalli Spacemacs

Using CIDER test runner in Spacemacs with Clojure CLI projects. Covering the Spacemacs specific key bindings, and how to configure the CIDER test runner in Spacemacs.

Hint on turning off custom themes to get the classic Emacs look. The theme called default looks the same as classic Emacs.

Created a reference sheet for CIDER configuration variables, as there is no overall reference.

Using .dir-locals.el for project specific configuration.

Spacemacs Pull Requests

Refactor applications menu key bindings to create more room for key bindings and improve mnemonic keybinding use. Sub menus added using the layer categories of the packages any existing key bindings originate from.