And some free t-shirt ideas

I've been rewriting my reading app from scratch and open-sourcing it in the progress. I'm using it to experiment with new Biff features.

I'm using Pathom to organize Yakread's code.

I've started open-sourcing Yakread. I'm going to try publishing videos about it along the way. This first video describes Yakread's schema.

Here's a thing I'm trying out to make testing easier.

Biff is becoming more interesting for large projects.

I've been re-implementing Yakread with Biff's upcoming indexes feature.

The new "indexes" feature makes it easy to denormalize your main XT database so you can query for things faster.

I recently finished an experimental migration of the Biff starter app to use XTDB v2 instead of v1.

I gave a presentation for the London Clojurians meetup this week. It starts out with a standard "what is Biff" overview, then in the second half I discuss my thought process/motivations for a few of Biff's features.

I've just released v1.8.0. See the release notes for upgrade instructions. The biggest change is to the way Biff handles config and tasks by default.

New articles, a couple releases, the roadmap, and some thoughts on Pathom.

The more the following points apply to you, the more likely Biff is to be a good fit.

If you'd like to use Biff but you've decided that you'd prefer to use ClojureScript and React instead of htmx, I've made a demonstration of how to integrate re-frame with Biff.

I've created an example repo that starts with a fresh Biff project and then modifies it to use Postgres instead of XTDB, for those who would like to use a traditional RDBMS.

How do we write frameworks that make composition reusable without sacrificing simplicity in the process?

XTDB, the database that Biff uses by default, is still fairly niche. Why not go with Postgres or Datomic?

Including htmx by default is one of the main design decisions I've made in Biff. If htmx is a good fit for your project, you might find it has a pretty high bang-for-buck ratio—that's been my experience at least.

I got a job, set up a new Biff forum, received Clojurists Together funding, got interviewed on the Defn podcast, and did a little coding.

Video demonstration of deploying a Biff app to a DigitalOcean server.

I've created a git repository that contains the default Biff starter project, modified to use Electric instead of htmx.

This release mainly contains a bunch of stylistic and structural changes to the starter project.

Most of the reasons fall into a few categories: data orientation, the JVM, and the REPL.

Biff's method of system composition is quite minimalist. I've been thinking about how it relates to other approaches like that of Integrant.

This past week I've been playing around with serverless functions on DigitalOcean. They're nice for using JS libs without needing to run Node and the JVM on the same machine.

I've made a couple releases recently that overhaul the way Biff does secrets management and authentication.

It's been about a year now since the current "era" of Biff started. I've been very pleased with Biff since then, and it's had much more community usage than it did previously.

Last night I finished writing the last section of Biff's new official tutorial. It takes you through the process of building an app called eelchat.

We closed #12: Use select component for theme in Platypub.

There's a new Biff release out, and I'm being sponsored by Clojurists Together.

We attempted to use Fly Machines to run some untrusted Babashka code. Hilariously, it turns out that the Fly Machines API was having downtime while we recorded this video.

We replaced Biff's task shell script with Babashka tasks (partially, anyway). I demonstrate how to store tasks in separate repository so they can be shared by multiple projects.

A few small releases, some meetups, Platypub + Yakread updates, and some future plans for code and docs.

I have more-or-less an unlimited supply of ideas of web applications to create. If you're in the market for a new side project idea, here are a few suggestions that you're welcome to steal.

We added password authentication to Platypub

We went into some details about Platypub themes.

I did a solo coding session this time. We started a new application and added some basic RSS-reader functionality.

Stuff that happened in July, plus some future plans.

Jeff Parker drove in today's pair session. He gave a demo of Platypub and closed three issues related to the UI for sending newsletters.

Jeremy Taylor drove in today's pair session, and he fixed a bug in Platypub where users would get an Internal Server Error if they tried to create a new site or newsletter without first adding API keys for Netlify or Mailgun, respectively (issue #19).

Platypub is meant to help people learn Biff, the Clojure web framework I made.

Screencast of developing a Biff application while it runs in production.

As a way to help people learn Biff, I've been thinking about creating a "large" (compared to toy projects, at least) example application. Ideally it would be something genuinely useful that would warrant ongoing development for a long time, perhaps indefinitely.

Video demo of setting up, developing, and deploying a new Biff project.

After 10 weekends of development, I’m [positive emotion] to announce a new major release of Biff, the full-stack Clojure web framework that I’ve been using in my small bootstrapped business for the past couple years.

I recently applied and was accepted for the $1,000 grant tier from Clojurists Together. Afterward I asked the fine folks at JUXT if they’d like to pitch in as well—since Biff is built on XTDB, it seemed like a good fit. They’re now sponsoring Biff/me for $1,000/month. I’m deeply grateful!