Kira Howe

Posts/2024×12 entries

December 31, 2024

OSS Updates November and December 2024

This is a summary of the open source work I spent my time on throughout November and December 2024. This was the last period of my ongoing funding from Clojurists together. It's been such a magical year in many ways and I'm so grateful to have had the opportunity to spend so much time focusing on open source this year. It was a fantastic experience and I hope to be able to take another professional hiatus at some point in the future to do it again. […7 min read]

post#clojure#clojurists-together#open-source#oss-updates

December 30, 2024

Yet another website reboot

Every year around this time I get an uncontrollable urge to redo my personal website. It's total madness but I don't know how to stop it. I am very inspired by other bloggers who are able to sustain a coherent presence on the internet for decades, and I want to be one of them. I always think I've narrowed down the problem and have a reasonable solution in mind, but really it's just the same cycle repeating itself. […2 min read]

post#blogging#static-websites

Overcoming perfectionism

The main thing I want to overcome in 2025 is perfectionism. I have a very hard time making progress on projects until I'm confident they'll be "good", but the problem is that this is a totally arbitrary descriptor and usually irrelevant anyway. Not wanting to do things unless they're perfect prevents me from doing so many things in the first place. It's very frustrating but I don't know how to fix it yet. This is something I plan to work on this year. […1 min read]

post#personal#reflections

October 31, 2024

August 31, 2024

July 18, 2024

Data Manipulation in Clojure Compared to R and Python

I spend a lot of time developing and teaching people about Clojure's open source tools for working with data. Almost everybody who wants to use Clojure for this kind of work is coming from another language ecosystem, usually R or Python. Together with Daniel Slutsky, I'm working on formalizing some of the common teachings into a course. Part of that is providing context for people coming from other ecosystems, including "translations" of how to accomplish data science tasks in Clojure. […13 min read]

post#clojure#data-science#python#r#scicloj

June 30, 2024

OSS Updates May and June 2024

This is a summary of the open source work I've spent my time on throughout May and June, 2024. There were lots of small bug fixes and reports, driven by work on the Clojure Data Cookbook. This work was also the impetus for my initial release of tcutils, a library of utility functions for working with tablecloth datasets. I also had the wonderful opportunity to attend PyData London in June and found it really insightful and inspiring. Read on for more details. […7 min read]

post#clojure#clojurists-together#open-source#oss-updates

April 30, 2024

April 4, 2024

The Current State of ML in Clojure

I had a really enlightening talk with Daniel Slutsky this week (who is an exceptional data scientist, software engineer, and community organizer I highly recommended meeting if you haven't already) about the current state of the machine learning landscape in Clojure. This post is my attempt to distill it into a summary for the community's benefit, so more people can understand where things are at and what the active developers in this space are working on. […8 min read]

post#clojure#machine-learning#scicloj

February 29, 2024

OSS Updates January and February 2024

I was lucky enough to get funding this year from Clojurists together to work on some open source projects for the Clojure community. It's been a really fun couple of months getting more involved in the ecosystem and having the time to work on some projects that I've long thought would be valuable for the community. This post is a summary of the things I've been working on over the past two months. […3 min read]

post#clojure#clojurists-together#open-source#oss-updates