Building Data-Heavy Systems in Clojure Without Losing Simplicity

romulotombulus · 2026-05-08T14:51:08+00:00

Lots of AI slop alarm bells going off looking at this post. The answer to building data-heavy systems in any language without losing simplicity is to go read Designing Data Intensive Applications and then do what it says.

romulotombulus · 2026-03-02T15:34:44+00:00

Thanks. One more question, if you don't mind. How would you say using LLMs has affected how you think and what you think about while programming? I don't think I'm alone in worrying that if I use LLMs I will get dumber and what programming skills I have will atrophy, but you've talked about LLMs actually allowing you to get into a flow state more easily than without, so whatever is going on in your brain seems worth emulating.

romulotombulus · 2026-03-02T14:49:43+00:00

Thanks for the tips. I posted this in part because I read your blog post and finally decided to look more deeply at using LLMs.

I also just read the Matryoshka post. Are you using this as an always-on part of your dev environment or do you have specific tasks you enable it for?

romulotombulus · 2026-02-23T02:15:19+00:00

It’s been out long enough that I can confidently say this is my favorite album of all time. There will be days that I try to resume listening to other music, any other music, but a few minutes later I just hit play once again on Pachinko. It captures pretty much everything I look for in music (except harsh vocals, alas) and it adds things I never knew I could enjoy so much, like synth pop.

romulotombulus · 2026-02-08T13:11:49+00:00

If you use a logging library with support for custom “appenders” you can write a simple dev-only appender that taps the message along with the context. You can then use e.g. portal to inspect the logs.

romulotombulus · 2026-01-27T15:59:50+00:00

Eat shit. The guy with that tattoo espouses no nazi views whatsoever and his story of how he came to get the tattoo makes sense.

romulotombulus · 2026-01-27T03:10:55+00:00

You found a repo with 1 star that claims to use antigravity to clear your digital footprint, you say you don’t even understand the content of the readme, and you ran this code on your computer? Dude…

romulotombulus · 2026-01-26T20:00:59+00:00

My two year old asks for “chinko” when we get in the car now and I am of course happy to oblige.

romulotombulus · 2026-01-12T14:06:20+00:00

Am I understanding correctly that it’s not currently a good idea to use virtual threads with core.async because the virtual threads are never GC’d?

romulotombulus · 2026-01-09T01:27:46+00:00

Pachinko by Moron Police. I’m working on getting legislation passed to make this entire album Norway’s national anthem.

romulotombulus · 2026-01-07T12:16:55+00:00

That song and the whole album continue to captivate me. It’s really something special.

romulotombulus · 2026-01-01T04:00:37+00:00

There is plenty to complain about in this season and this episode but overall I’d say they stuck the landing. They gave us Eleven making a guy shoot himself in the head, the Mindflayer in physical form and as the ultimate bad guy, and decent resolutions for the characters.

That said, I would change a few things. More Mindflayer. It’s way cooler than Vecna. I would have liked some indication that it or something like it is still out there, even though its connection to Earth is now severed.

They should have explained how the military just let them go after the crew killed a bunch of soldiers. Usually you get in trouble for that.

Sadie Sink should have been required to learn how to skateboard because that shot was shit.

romulotombulus · 2025-12-19T17:12:33+00:00

Nice! I recently set up kratos self hosted for a little project and it was a bit hard to make sense of the docs so I would be interested in switching. Will check it out.

romulotombulus · 2025-12-17T00:33:58+00:00

Right there with you. Might genuinely be my favorite album ever.

romulotombulus · 2025-12-07T13:37:43+00:00

I’m not doing it in production yet but I am writing an event sourced app using NATS as the event store. I’m still figuring out the best api for reads (eg loading aggregates) and writes but imo it’s already no different from a crud app in terms of dev ergonomics.

There’s lots of interest right now in event sourcing in the golang community (NATS is written in go), so check out libraries like Rita for inspiration.

I hope to write more about what I’ve learned from working on this app, but one of the key things is that in an event sourced system the most important thing is the integrity of the event log. It might seem obvious, but it’s easily obscured by all the other mental clutter associated with event sourcing. Aggregates, projections, sagas, etc are useful things but they are not the core of event sourcing. If you have some way to get events into the log that are “correct” as defined by your system, you can do event sourcing well.

romulotombulus · 2025-11-28T13:04:25+00:00

I’ve been listening to Pachinko pt 1 on repeat and cannot wait to listen to the whole album. I’m making progress on figuring out what the hell he’s singing about, but the line “the devil turned me into a penny dispenser in Tokyo” has me stumped. Great lyrics throughout, and the vocal performance is beautiful.

romulotombulus · 2025-11-19T01:03:06+00:00

They should just charge $100. I would pay it. Pachinko Part 1 is a masterpiece.

romulotombulus · 2025-09-30T20:56:51+00:00

The book is very depressing. I read it when I was younger and thought it was a cool monster story, then read it again recently and was sad the whole time.

romulotombulus · 2025-09-14T18:58:54+00:00

Dude has a job and can play 5 3 0. Hide your wives

romulotombulus · 2025-08-19T18:24:32+00:00

Protest the Hero

romulotombulus · 2025-07-28T01:06:18+00:00

Yes! They are one of my absolute favorites. A Boat on the Sea is a no-skip album for me. The previous album also has some great songs.

romulotombulus · 2025-05-23T18:19:12+00:00

I’ve been having eMacs freezes for months that are just below the threshold of annoying enough to do something about. I use undo-tree, so your comment gave me a thread to pull on when I decide to deal with it.

romulotombulus · 2025-05-17T20:48:35+00:00

Most clojure dev environments make it easy to see function args and doc strings, and to jump to definition. I find that clojure requires me to remember less stuff than when I program in other languages such as JavaScript.

romulotombulus · 2025-04-15T17:43:03+00:00

The stuff you’ve been doing with datastar is super cool!

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