Aditya Athalye's Eval/Apply Blog

Having played both parts in the kabuki play that is employee-employer matchmaking, I feel the way we play it is a zero-sum game.

Aiming for last place at the 2025 Berggruen Prize Open Essay Contest, on the theme of consciousness, intelligence, and the nature of mind in an age of advancing artificial systems.

I, for one, welcome the coming age of the post-LLM-datacenter-overinvestment-bust-fueled backyard GPU supercomputer revolution.

Because I realised thinking like this is not obvious to Clojure newcomers, especially those having non-FP first languages.

On trying to mash up SQLite with ideas stolen from Accountants, Clojure, Datomic, XTDB, Rama, and Local-first-ers, to satisfy Henderson's Tenth Law.

The making of a diamond is a repeatable, but naturally non-reproducible process.

Is demo of Grug Clojure code vibe.

Strong writing culture transforms merely competent software teams into elite ones; those proverbial 10x product builders.

Some thinking, trade-offs, theory building, and method-making one might ended up doing, in the course of bringing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) discipline to brownfield (and greenfield) services, at a small regulated fintech company, having a smaller engin…

The first quarter elapsed.

In a land bereft of a canonical "killer app" web framework or two, one must think about the what, why, how, where of all the moving parts.

On (mis)using Clojure's concurrency features to make an in-memory job runner, because I needed an excuse to use more than atoms for once.

Writing is thinking.

The current wave of AI tools is incredibly cool.

In a world of concrete objects, steel frameworks bring sense and order.

The one in which we design a rich Integrated Development Environment (IDE) experience, using Clojure as our muse.

We want to maximize our ability to "stay in The Zone".

Or the one in which we confront our elisp n00bishness and try to be better at using it.

Elpa, Melpa, git repo.

The first action must, of course, be to colour the bikeshed and set some decent defaults.

Or, finally biting the bullet to redesigning my developerly and writerly experience, from the ground up, with Emacs.

Arguably a more interesting, revealing, and kinder question than "What are you curious about?"

Making a software demo is a form of deliberate, serious play.

"What are folks’ views on systems so large where cold-starting the whole system is almost impossible?"...

A while ago, someone in the Recurse Center nerdiverse decided we needed a "Bad Print".

Trying out a classification for "Tools for Thought" as a means of augmenting the human intellect, hot on the heels of recent community conversations about ChatGPT, CoPilot, Stable Diffusion etc...

It is with no small thanks to MDN, StackOverflow, Firefox's support for countless open tabs, JavaScript's support for first-class functions, and first-class supportive colleagues, I learned it is possible for a web front end novice to program "text art an…

Here I illustrate how Clojurists (including Yours Truly) like to solve problems and model things using hammocks, pure functions, and the "it's just data" ideology.

Newcomers to Clojure so frequently ask this question that an FAQ/Guide is being discussed, to add to the Clojure website.

Or, the one in which we hand-craft nano Unix tools using Bash functions.

I find myself telling people that they will have to pry org-mode from my cold dead hands.

FizzBuzz is everywhere.

Or, the one in which we "take apart" Douglas McIlroy's pipeline from 1986.

This primer is for people like me, who long dreamed of lovingly hand-crafting our own home on the Internet.

Dismal arithmetic is just like the arithmetic you learned in school, only simpler: there are no carries, when you add digits you just take the largest, and when you multiply digits you take the smallest.

Or, *Supremely Functional Bash Programming*, an exploration in N parts...

In which we ponder the Functional Nature of Life, The Universe, and Everything.

Here lies melancholy that I put to paper from a particularly deep hole, not too long ago.

Technology is—and ought to be—the /byproduct/ of far more important, powerful, and deep-rooted aspects of organisations — including wholesale societies.

Every so often, I want to avoid opening a website in a browser, for ... reasons.

Spurred by a conversation with a whip-smart friend and fellow gentlenerd, who unreasonably believed (believes?)

Not a weighty meandering 300 page Zen dialogue on Motorcycle Maintenance.

I've long struggled with the *Technical* Debt metaphor.

Creating things is a delicate endeavour, fraught with peril.

How this blog came to be is a minor miracle.