I'm Bozhidar and I love computers in general and programming in particular. My fanatic devotion to Emacs is known world-wide.
That's the paragraph I've been recycling as my conference bio for over a decade and it still holds up. I spend a lot of my (free) time on GitHub, contributing to various open-source Ruby, Clojure and Emacs Lisp projects. Ruby got me RuboCop and a pile of style guides, Clojure got me CIDER and nREPL, Emacs got me pretty much everything else.
The work is spread over a few accounts: @rubocop, @clojure-emacs, @nrepl, @flycheck and this one.
Most of my time goes to CIDER. Completion got modernized, the debugging tools got sharper, find-usages finally does what people expect, and the ClojureScript story is in much better shape than it was. I write most of it up on Meta Redux.
Projectile and RuboCop keep shipping releases, which after all these years still surprises me a little. And nREPL is slowly escaping Clojure: nrepl-beam brings servers to Erlang and Elixir, neat is a small language-agnostic client for Emacs. nREPL Forever explains why I think this matters.
RuboCop, rubocop-ast, rubocop-rails, rubocop-emacs, and the style guides for Ruby, Rails, RSpec and Minitest.
CIDER, nREPL, cider-nrepl, orchard, clojure-mode, clojure-ts-mode, inf-clojure, Port, Piggieback, Drawbridge, and the Clojure Style Guide.
Emacs is the One True Editor and my biggest life-long obsession. You can safely describe me as an unreasonable (but powerful) Emacs wielding fanatic.
Projectile, Prelude, Crux, super-save, Flycheck, asciidoc-mode, neocaml, fsharp-ts-mode, and the themes (Batppuccin, Tokyo Night, Zenburn, Solarized). My config lives here, and there's an Emacs Lisp Style Guide too.
The full inventory is on my projects page.
I have a small problem with blogs - I've created way too many of them:
- (think) is the personal one, where everything that doesn't fit elsewhere ends up
- Meta Redux covers my OSS work and release announcements
- Emacs Redux is short, practical Emacs articles
I'm not some ninja pro rock-star conference speaker, but I do the occasional tech talk here and there, and from time to time they don't even suck.
I've always struggled to write about myself, so here's some random trivia instead:
- Batman is my favorite superhero. I went to see "The Dark Knight" 7 times.
- I once watched "Gladiator" around 20 times in one week. I used to know every line.
- I've been to 60 countries and I dream of retiring in Andalucia.
- My first computer cost $1011 in 1998. I had no plans to do any programming on it.
- My name literally means "a gift from God".
You can also learn a fair bit from the books I read and the music I listen to.
Email works best, first name at batsov.com. I'm also on Mastodon, which is the only social media I actually enjoy, and on Bluesky. I accept most LinkedIn invites, but I rarely reply to anything there.
Free software is a lot of fun, but it also takes a lot of time and energy. If any of this makes your work better, consider chipping in:
Thanks!
Thinking outside the box might be cool, but nothing beats thinking inside parentheses.