I thought the same thing, 35 times...

30. The editors boosted it to 32. The automated links to other articles added the rest.

Communicating sequential processes

The most difficult project I have solved (just finishing up the implementation) is developing a monitoring solution for a bunch of legacy telephone PBX's.

Essentially, the bureaucratic overhead for getting a bunch of companies to open their firewalls to us was unfeasible. Long story short, I ended up hijacking the SSL/VPN generated by a running JVM to forward a bunch of SNMP/OSSI-polling traffic to our api.

At the end, after implementing the above, I found out about a service port for outgoing only traffic offered to business partners. That was much easier to use, only requiring nginx to split off a certain sub-path of SSL traffic + business partner status.

I am still proud of the original hack, although brittle and ugly it was very exciting to get working.

As am I

Thats a bad argument. Pickup an imperative language (python), learn a function language (Clojure), and you pretty much have your basis covered with whatever the future throws at you.

http://functionaljobs.com/ seems to have a few postings. It is strange that there seems to be a huge desire for Clojure programmers but I have seen very little in the way of wanted adds.

Rich Hickey - Simple Made Easy http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy

Changed how I think about a lot of stuff, made my design process a lot more rigorous, and my projects more successful.

Agreed, changed my thinking completely now when people use easy and simple I explicitly try to clarify their meaning.

I've been searching for something like that for a while now. A metrics web framework that consumes and renders json/edn would be interesting.

I've been using shopify/dashing for metrics display:

http://shopify.github.io/dashing/

You can post JSON directly to each widget. It's also based on Sinatra.

Someone already created a widget for Rickshaw graphs, I suppose it could be adapted to use D3.js.

Unless there are significant differences in the way a web framework is structured (i.e. Pedestal for Clojure), I find that making a web app doesn't really contribute much to learning the intricacies of the language.

I like to try out a languages interesting features by wrapping an existing library in an idiomatic style suitable for that language. For example my most recent work is attempting a wrapper around SNMP4j in Clojure, foregoing the OO style for a more data-centric approach.

I like this idea! Having spent so long in Ruby land, I'm not as familiar with the Scala|Clojure|Haskell library scene, but I'm sure that's easily remedied.

You would be surprised how easy it is! Often when new to a language, especially if it crosses paradigms, contributing to an existing project is difficult. Wrapping another library that may be obscure or niche allows you the freedom to fail and learn from your mistakes.

About two years

I'm serious, two years of an hour or two a day (at least!) will give you enough foundation to really enjoy it. You have to start with tutorial, use the sample projects you build and change them drastically. Break them, improve them, talk to people about them.

The issue that is most common is the starting momentum is difficult. There are some concepts that are dead simple in programming, by their nature they are composable. The composition of simple concepts form virtually all the higher level concepts. It's not so much learning to code as it is learning to think in a certain way.