Well Known Identifiers and Reloadable Systems

A second Tea Leaves edition, please bear with us as we try to find our stride.

Some Goodbyes

For economic reasons Gaiwan has recently significantly shrunk its team. We say goodbye to Ariel, Joshua, and Gabriel. They were all great colleagues, and we wish them the best in their future career and in life. Keep in touch!

We're taking this as an opportunity with the remaining people to find some renewed focus and clarity on where we want the company to go in the coming years. One thing that's clear is that we are a provider of expertise, and we want to put even more effort into sharing that expertise with the world. Hence this Tea Leaves newsletter and the accompanying Tea Garden pattern repository.

Garden News

We've added two patterns to the pattern repository, Well Known Identifier, and Reloadable Component System.

Component Systems as pioneered by Alessandra Sierra are familiar to many Clojurists, and at this point we have a smorgasbord of choices. The original Component, Integrant, or Mount, just to name the most popular ones. In a future ecosystem analysis we want to put them into an overview, and explain how they differ and how to pick one that suits your need. Before that however we needed a description of the pattern itself, with a home on the web. Hence the new Reloadable Component System page.

A Well Known Identifier should look familiar for many developers. In this case we're observing commonalities between a number of different existing naming practices, and using that to say "hey, there's something interesting going on here, we can recognize a pattern". Once captured the pattern can go from holding descriptive and explanatory power, to also gaining generative powers.

Heart of Clojure

The organizing of Heart of Clojure is in full swing! We just closed the CFP, and boy we got some really great stuff in there. We'll need a few more weeks to sort it all out, but stay tuned for the first program announcements. It's going to be another amazing edition. Make sure to grab a ticket while they're still available!

Personal

This will be the first summer that I own a garden. I've had a green thumb since I was a teenager, and despite the historically wet spring in Belgium I've already had plenty of chance to enjoy getting my hands in the dirt. The wet weather has caused an explosion of snails, so it's hard to get any vegetables going. That's why for now I'm still keeping them in pots and close to the house for now. This weekend I repotted a handful of tomatoes, some lettuce, basil and other stuff. (as shown in the header picture)