Rite of passage

Really haven't been doing too well with the whole blog thing, but I also really want to change that. Re-developing this site completely is (maybe?) a good start down that road.

I'll write more about it in a couple days, but to sum up, I ended up getting another day job around the end of April. Another corporate-y type job, but I think the team I'm working with now is a big step in the right direction, which is primarily what I was looking for when I made the decision to start looking for a new day job.

Another thing I was looking for was that it not be a "Microsoft shop." Instead this place is a Java shop. Not totally weird and different compared to the Microsoft world (that is, .NET to JVM), especially considering when most Microsoft developers decide to move on, they usually seem to end up with Ruby. However, one of the reasons I decided to take the job I did, was that they do a lot of Clojure development. I wasn't looking specifically for Clojure, but it was more about what that said about the place that piqued my interest. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places, but it seemed to me at the time that finding an employer who works with functional programming languages is a bit hard. I was looking for something different, and I like to think I found it.

So, as is typical for me when learning a new web stack, I'm re-writing my blog. This is written using Luminus which is a Clojure micro-framework that so far I quite enjoy using. And that's good, because I also use it at work now, heh.

For deployment, I have Apache configured to reverse proxy to a Jetty instance serving up the Clojure web app. Fairly simple stuff, and it was a good exercise for someone who has never deployed a Java web app. I wanted to keep my existing Apache set up if possible since I still have some PHP stuff lurking around, so the less I disturb on that front, the better.

Additionally, I use CouchDB for the database. This is mostly because it's used for quite a number of web apps at work, so it seemed like a good idea to get comfortable with it. I'd been meaning to toy with a NoSQL database for a while, and this was a nice excuse to finally do that. I have to admit I rather enjoy to simplicity of it.

Design wise, I figured I'd stick with a really simple Bootstrap-based style. I really don't care for trying to come up with some custom design and I rather like the clean, minimalist look of Bootstrap even if it is a bit overdone on the web today. I may at some point later on use a custom theme for it, but we'll see.

This blog engine is mostly complete, but is still missing support for comments. I'll get to that over the next few days, but for now it's not a big deal since no one reads this anyway!