Gaiwan: September Recap

We had a busy month at Gaiwan! Here are some things that happened in September.

Blog Updates

First, Arne released a blog post on his stance on AI which sums up how we approach AI and LLMs at Gaiwan:

In addition, Laurence released his series of 30 articles about Fennel.

GitHub - humorless/fennel-fp-neovim: A series of articles exploring Fennel and Functional Programming in Neovim

A series of articles exploring Fennel and Functional Programming in Neovim - humorless/fennel-fp-neovim

GitHubhumorless

Lastly, we migrated all the blog posts on Lambda Island to our main website; you can check it out here. Check out some our favorite old posts!

Improve your code by separating mechanism from policy

by Arne Brasseur Years ago when I was still a programming baby, I read about a concept, a way of thinking about code, and it has greatly influenced how I think about code to this day. I’ve found it tremendously helpful when thinking about API design, or how to

Gaiwan / Heart of ClojureArne Brasseur

The Art of Tree Shaping with Clojure Zippers

This is a talk I did for the “Den of Clojure” meetup in Denver, Colorado. Enjoy! Captions (subtitles) are available, and you can find the transcript below, as well as slides over here. For comments and discussion please refer to this post on r/Clojure. Transcript Arne: My name is

Gaiwan / Heart of ClojureArne Brasseur

Open Source Updates

We released two new libraries:

• co.gaiwan/mcp-sdk our take on a MCP (Model Context Protocol) implementation. We've been playing around with the very cool Clojure MCP, but Clojure MCP only supports the STDIO transport. Here's an example of how to use mcp-sdk to provide a clojure_eval tool. Check out the README for more information!
• lambdaisland/dbus-client DBUS has become the IPC (inter-process communication) mechanism of choice on Linux. It's used extensively to make things work smoothly in desktop environments and is also used on the system level, for example: to control Systemd resources. We found that the Java bindings were difficult to work with from Clojure, because they do runtime reflection on concrete interface implementations. Clojure is highly dynamic, unlike Java, so we created something that could talk to DBUS more directly. We've pushed out a lot of code recently, and it's now at the stage where early adopters can start experimenting with it.

Also, this past month, we closed up some issues and moved some projects over to GH actions in preparation for a new release soon for Kaocha / 考察 [kǎo chá]. Stay tuned for more open source news!

Upcoming Events

Arne will be speaking at the London Clojurians online meetup about the Gaiwan Stack on Nov 11. As an online meetup, you can join from anywhere. Please sign up here: https://www.meetup.com/london-clojurians/events/311341652/

Let's Talk! 🍵 ☕

At Gaiwan, we're looking to have more conversations with our community. One of the reasons we're called Gaiwan is that we want to savor a cup a tea, ideally with good company. So whether you have questions or suggestions about our open source projects or our stance on AI, just hit reply and reach out.