On the 10th anniversary of Jekyll being my blog engine of choice, my curiosity (and spare time during the holidays) got the better of me. I wanted to explore how well Clojure would fare compared to the original Jekyll implementation in Ruby.
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Every time I heard people praise static types, I wondered why I didn’t share their enthusiasm. After careful reflection, I realized that static types don’t significantly influence how I approach or solve problems. I also didn’t experience fewer bugs, easier debugging, or greater team productivity when using them.
As software grows and challenges our ability to reason about it, we seek ways to regain clarity and confidence when making changes. I believe static types provide a sense of security as they are intended to help us manage complexity.
However, I think this sense of security can lead to complacency, causing developers to overlook more effective solutions.
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Plus 30 years ago, probably around seventh grade, I remember my teacher asking the classroom: How do you get better a writing essays and short stories?
She answered the question herself, and because it took me by surprise, I still remember it today. I had heard grown-ups with their wise words: If you want to be good at X, you have to practice X. X being anything from football to piano to cooking. My younger self had assumed that the best way to get better at writing would be:
To write.
But it wasn’t.
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Summer or something resembling it has come to Denmark, and the winter blues is losing its grip. Grass fields with flocks of sheep have been a common sight along the motorway for a couple of months now. But the other day, I saw something that I don’t expect to see again any time soon. A fairly big bird sitting comfortably on the back of a sheep, and neither seemed to make a big deal about it. It put a big grin on my face. If I had a bad day, I no longer remember. Apparently, my stumblings aren’t confined to the digital world. Though with my limited “getting outside”, I guess that is where it mostly happens, as the following can testify to.
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I’ve been tumbling down a rabbit hole for a little while now.
Feeling a desire to “write more” on my blog, motivated me to enhance the overall reading experience. However, customizing a Jekyll blog is not always easy due to the inherent limitations of the Liquid templating language and the modest amount of available plugins for GitHub Pages. Nevertheless, an improved reading experience led me to want a “featured image”. But images tend to affect webpage load speed… and speed matters. The featured image needed to be responsive and optimized, although doing it by hand made me shiver. Any manual repetitive process is boring and prone to errors. On top, it would remove the focus from writing. Suddenly I found myself scouring the internet for information about responsive images and semi-automating the image optimization process with a Babashka script interfacing with TinyPNGs API.
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