A quick introduction to the Clojure language by way of discussing solutions to Project Euler problems. Also my first impressions of the language, the install and setup process, and the state of support for Clojure within different development tools.

I’ve been in need of new workstation for a while, and finally plunked down the cash for it. I built a mid range workstation and installed the latest long term release of Ubuntu (Hardy Heron) 64 bit.

This shortcut reference card covers mostly intermediate and advanced shortcuts for GNU emacs (most of them will work with Xemacs as well.) Become a more productive and competent developer on emacs by learning these shortcuts.

This is the second interview in an ongoing (but sporadic) series of interviews with famous programmers and authors of books that should be required reading for any serious developer.  Lynne Jolitz is an accomplished author, 386BSD hacker, Silicon Valley entrepreneur, and all-around geek.  She has long been a figure in the tech community.  Regular readers [...]

This is a list of the best sites on the net for practicing your coding chops, showing off your programming skills, and competing for fame and fortune. Exercise your brain by untangling obfuscation, applying algorithms knowledge, growing your inner math geek, or playing a bit of code golf.

With all of the gloom and doom forecasts about the global recession and layoffs everywhere, I’m interested to hear how this mess is affecting programmers. Despite the generally abysmal outlook, many statistics specific to the tech sector fall into the unchanged or optimistic buckets.  Meanwhile, TechCrunch and others are proclaiming that the tech industry [...]

This is a tutorial on how to setup a Subversion (SVN) repository on Windows that allows secure connections over SSH. The tutorial also goes through setting up an SVN client and connecting to the repository. Some basic knowledge of a UNIX based command line will help, but you might be able to muddle through [...]

Show off your inner geek with these t-shirts from CafePress. There are quite a few classic geek shirts here: Space Invaders, Ubuntu, Whisky Tango Foxtrot (WTF!), Office Space, the regular expression version of “To be or not to be”, Lisp, and more. Click on any shirt for purchase details.

GrokCode is giving away some free schwag to thank our readers this month. Up for grabs is a free T-shirt, golf shirt, or tanktop that will announce to the world that you grok code. Entering is as easy as subscribing to GrokCode via email or RSS feed, then confirming that you are an active [...]

Open source projects can be a good way to geek out and do what you love, and having a side project can help improve overall job satisfaction, keep you at the top of your hacking game, and can often lead to other opportunities. The problem is a lot of people have trouble making that [...]

This is the first interview in an ongoing series of mini-interviews with famous developers and programming authors. Rebecca Heineman has kindly agreed to be the first interviewee. She has been a games programmer for almost 30 years - she has written and designed many titles over the course of her career including a Bards [...]

This is a collection of 4 programming brain teasers in C and Java.  Some require a sudden flash of insight or knowledge of good coding style to solve, others demand intimate knowledge of the compilation process. The problems range from easy to insanely tricky.  The C brain teasers come from The C Puzzle Book and [...]

‘Grok’ is a fairly common word amongst geeks and techies, and usage is especially dense within the Computer Science university crowd, but it hasn’t really permeated mainstream usage. So where did the word ‘grok’ come from? What exactly does it mean? Have you grokked grok? It only makes sense that a site called GrokCode [...]

This article is a quick journey through the mind of a Scala newbie while learning the language. I work through a few Project Euler problems, refining solutions along the way so they use more idiomatic Scala. In the end I give some general impressions of the language, the install and setup process, the [...]

Well this is the third edition of the sweet hacks series. In each edition I highlight clever code, cool uses of technology, and do it yourself projects that I find on the net. Anyone is welcome to submit their own sweet hacks via the blog carnival page or by sending an email to [...]

This is a follow up to the list of recommended books for a hacker’s bookshelf that was posted a few months ago. Here are 5½ more essential books for a hacker’s bookshelf. This list is based on reader suggestions, and like the previous list of recommended programming books, it contains a nice [...]

Portfolios have been used for years by architects, artists, and designers, but why not for computer programmers? A programming portfolio is a great way to showcase your best work, and highlight your involvement in challenging projects. It provides a great talking point during an interview, and gives more insight into your work [...]

View an analysis of 222 famous programmers who are revered in the hacker culture as respected innovators, superstar coders, and the heroes of the computer revolution. Graphs break down the projects that propelled them to fame, the number of projects it took to make them famous, and the relative numbers of men and women [...]

Everybody has a different idea of which languages are important. And the answer really depends on who you are and what you believe is important. I came to programming through a theoretical computer science route which initially gave me a shallow understanding of a wide breadth of topics. In this school of [...]

Welcome to Volume II of the sweet hacks series. A sweet hack can be a clever piece of code, an innovative way of solving a technical problem, or pretty much whatever strikes me as cool. This edition includes Star Wars, Twitter, Rubik’s cubes, Webcams, Pong, Legos, and the Naked Game - with [...]

In the first post in this series, I talked a bit about different indicators of job satisfaction and how you can rank your own job for each of those criteria. In this post I’ll list simple steps anyone can take to improve personal job satisfaction in each of these areas: quality of projects, work-life [...]

Are you satisfied with your job? Are you satisfied with where your career path is taking you? These are important questions, and I try to take time to think about this every 6 months or so. Its usually trivial to make a general statement rating job satisfaction: “Yeah I like my job.” [...]

The Eternity 2 (E2) puzzle has attracted the attention of puzzle fanatics, computer programmers, and mathematicians for many reasons, not the least of which is the $2 million prize for being the first to solve it. E2 is an edge-matching puzzle with 256 pieces. The general class of edge-matching puzzles [...]

Every hacker should have a good solid dead tree library to draw ideas from and use as reference material. This list has a bit of everything - textbooks you will encounter at top tier computer science universities, books giving insight into the industry, and references you shouldn’t be caught without. It is a [...]

A sweet hack can be a clever piece of code, an innovative way of solving a technical problem, or just a cool use of technology. I put together a list of 5 hacks that I think are really sweet.
I am making Sweet Hacks a regular series here at GrokCode, turning it into a blog [...]

This is a Common Lisp code walkthrough for generating original jokes. You seed the generator with the knowledge about different objects, and it uses that vocabulary to generate unique jokes. All of the jokes are of the form: “What do you get when you cross X with Y?” This code was originally [...]

Optimizing J2EE applications is hard. Even if all of your algorithms have been analyzed in big-O notation and finely tuned, you can have abysmal performance due to a poorly configured environment. J2EE applications depend on many lower layers which all must be properly optimized in order to give good overall performance. This [...]

I was looking for a Wordpress plugin to spice up comments with custom avatars, but I didn’t find exactly what I was looking for. So I hacked together the Ravatar Wordpress plugin that will display a randomly generated avatar for each visitor. The icons are based on email, so a given [...]

Every developer should have a collection of tools that at their disposal to facilitate project planning stages, speed development, automate testing and building, organize code versions, and otherwise make life easier. Here is a list of the standard tools in my toolbox that make me more productive. Almost all of them are F/OSS [...]

Apache Axis is an implementation of the SOAP protocol. It is a framework for constructing SOAP clients and servers. A Java client application is able to use a Web Service by calling Java stub classes created from WSDL files. These WSDL files are made availible by the SOAP server application. As [...]