Sept. 18, 2019
Speaking schedule 2019 and beyond

I've got three conference talks coming up in Perth (Australia), London, and The Gold Coast (Australia). If you're nearby let me know - I would love to buy you a coffee/beer and hear what you're up to.

Security BSides

This Sunday, September 22nd, Perth, Western Australia.

I'm presenting "Bugout: practical decentralization on the modern web." It's a talk about the library I built on top of WebTorrent for building web based decentralized systems.

Bsides Perth Logo

Clojure eXchange

December 2nd-3rd, London, UK.

I'm giving a keynote: a show and tell of the multitude of strange things I've been building with the Clojure[Script] family of programming languages, and how Clojure enables the bad habit of starting way too many projects. I'll also give an update on Thumbelina, the tiny MIDI controller I've been working on with my friend Dimity.

Skills Matter Clojure eXchange

Linux.conf.au

January 13th-17th, Gold Coast, Australia.

I'm talking about Piku, and how it helps you do git push deployments to your own servers. I've made a bunch of contributions to this open source project in recent months. I've personally found a huge productivity gain from being able to deploy internet services without having to think too much, and I'm excited to show others this too.

Linux Australia Logo

Aug. 17, 2019
ClojureScript Pixel Game Engine With Blender Live-reloading

Recently I've been hacking on a game engine for infinitelives called px3d.

around.gif

It's built on top of ClojureScript, Blender, and Three.js and it runs in the browser.

One feature I'm particularly happy with is the live-reloading of Blender assets into the game. You hit "save" in Blender and the updates appear in the running game a second later - no need to re-compile or re-load the game.

live-reloading.gif

The way this works is with a background script which watches the assets.blend file. It re-builds the assets.glb whenever it is modified, and writes the hash of the file into assets.cljs. Figwheel pushes changes to the compiled cljs files whenever they change, and there is another bit of code which tells three.js to re-load assets.glb if the hash has changed.

Infinitelives

Infinitelives is the vehicle me and my buddy Crispin use to make games and tooling, mostly for gamejams. The gamejam format is great because it is time-boxed, which means we can periodically do this self-indulgent thing we enjoy without taking too much family or work time.

Gamejams are typically only 48 hours long and so we have learned some good techniques for shipping working code under extreme constraints. A hardcore economy of time, resources, and scope is required.

ClojureScript & Figwheel are perfect for this with their hot-loading of modified code. I built the tight Blender re-load integration for the same reason. Hand drawn graphics consume a lot of time during jams and this should help us really level up on the content side of things.

cda02a53bdeea5ee13ac8d943761a42b.png

If you'd like to find out when we release games and new tools you can sign up to our release notifications on the infinitelives home page or follow us on Twitter.

If you liked this you might also like my Roguelike game web template which you can get on itch.io. Thanks for supporting my work!

Feb. 22, 2019
TOPLAP 15th Birthday Streamed Algorave

As part of the TOPLAP 15th Birthday live-stream I live-coded some algorithmic rave music in Speccy:

Speccy is a browser based environment for live-coding 8-bit algorithmic rave music in ClojureScript.

You can watch the videos of everybody who participated here.

Aug. 3, 2018
Live-code 8-bit algorave music in the browser with Clojurescript

Speccy is a small utililty I built for live-coding chiptune music in the browser with Clojurescript.

You can copy sounds from sfxr.me and paste them in as synth definitions, using code to modify any parameter over time, or start from scratch by building a synth up from basic parameters.

You can paste the following examples into the online editor to try it out:

; blippy synth
(sfxr {:wave :square :env/decay 0.1 :note #(at % 32 {0 24 3 29 7 60 12 52 19 29 28 52})})

; donk bass
(sfxr "1111128F2i1nMgXwxZ1HMniZX45ZzoZaM9WBtcQMiZDBbD7rvq6mBCATySSmW7xJabfyy9xfh2aeeB1JPr4b7vKfXcZDbWJ7aMPbg45gBKUxMijaTNnvb2pw"
      {:note #(or
        (at % 57
          {5 35
           27 34})
        (at % 32
           {0 24
            6 29
            18 21
            26 12}))})

; hi hat
(sfxr {:wave :noise
       :env/sustain 0.05
       :env/decay 0.05
       :vol #(sq % [0.3 0.1 0.2 0.1])})

; snare
(sfxr "7BMHBGCKUHWi1mbucW62sVAYvTeotkd4qSZKy91kof8rASWsAx1ioV4EjrXb9AHhuKEprWr2D4u4YHJpYEzWrJd8iitvr23br2DCGu7zMqFmPyoSFtUEqiM64"
      {:note 36
       :vol #(at % 16
         {4 0.5
          12 0.5})})

The full source code and documentation is available at GitHub.

Enjoy!

June 27, 2018
Frock: Clojure-flavoured PHP

Frock is a little experimental tool for writing PHP scripts using Clojure-like LISP syntax.

If you want to see what the code looks like, here's an example which fetches and lists top news items from the Hacker News API.

Some Frock code

Frock could be interesting to you if you are LISP or Clojure programmer writing a web application which is mostly front-end code, but which needs some small amount of server side logic for e.g. proxying, authentication, data persistence etc. and you want this application to be easily deployable by semi-technical users on commodity hosting.

Basically if your target audience is graphic designers, you like Clojure, and your backend requirements are slim, then you might be interested.

Why?

Pythagoras says no to Fava beans

PHP is an old server-side web development language which is simultaneously loathed by software developers everywhere, and also wildly popular and widely deployed. To reconcile this paradox let's take a look at some pros and cons of PHP.

Cons:

  • Ugly language semantics & features.
  • Dubious security record.
  • Much awful legacy code lying around.

Pros:

  • User-friendly app deployments (simply copy files to server).
  • Widely available on internet servers.
  • Mature language and ecosystem.
  • Excellent documentation.
  • Much useful tech bundled ("batteries included").

The pros make PHP quite democratic. It's very easy to install PHP code on widely available, cheap, commodity hosting. It's easy to get started writing PHP applications; the PHP binary comes pre-installed on OSX for example. PHP contains a lot of capabilities by default: zipping files, opening sockets, encryption, command execution.

Frock exists to make the language semantics and features less of a con for brace wrangling LISP heads, whilst retaining the wide deployment surface and other democratic features of PHP.