Just being a great developer or even a good one is not enough to create a great career. How effective you are at communicating your skills, experience and the value you can bring to others really drives the quality of your career. Luckily there are many ways to show off your skills, including those soft skills that are harder to quantify.

It is not just recruiters & human resources departments that can get you a job, but more and more it is other developers that bring you in to their teams. The more developers who know who you are, the more opportunities will be presented to you.

Activities you can do to boost your career include:

• Blogging & technical content
• Social media for research and communication
• digital presence
• Meetups, Conferences and public speaking
• Understanding the modern recruitment process

I will walk through this aspects to help you understand them in more detail and describe my experiences and any tips I have to share

Previously I covered aspects of creating your digital self previously, covering a range of social media and developer community websites.

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Creating your digital self helps you express who you are and what you are about online in a way that enhances your career and also help you in your daily work. Having a recognizable digital self also allow others to reach out to you and include you in the wider community.

Here are some tips and tools to help you create a consistent expression of your digital self.

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Adding the Clojure layer to Spacemacs provides great support for the language via CIDER, Clojure-mode, clj-refactor and lots of useful tools.

The Clojure layer also adds to the auto-completion layer, providing matches for anything currently defined in the current namespace. The yasnippets package also allows you to expand shortcuts for common Clojure code structures, eg. def, defn, let, require.

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Spacemacs is a community developed configuration for Emacs that makes it easier for anyone to use this amazing developer tool. Spacemacs is a well thought out way to apply the vast and diverse power of Emacs, making it more accessible especially to those who are used to using Vi.

Unless you’ve spent the last few years hand-crafting your own Emacs configuration, then I think you will enjoy Spacemacs. Here are some reasons why I love Spacemacs as an Emacs user.

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Time at a hackathon runs much faster that you think, so you can use Heroku to kickstart your app and get database services up and running instantly. Heroku also provides an easy way for a team to collaborate and let the judges see there app in action.

Here are a few tips on how to get going with Heroku and you can also use this Heroku commands cheetsheet for as a quick reference.

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Using templates to create your Clojure projects can save you a lot of setup time and ensure your team is using the same base configuration and dependencies. There are templates on Clojars.org, however I’ll show you how easy it is to create your own with Leiningen.

I’ll create a simple template based on the leiningen default template, adding a section in the project.clj to give a custom propmt when run in the repl.

Templates used to be a Leinigen pluging called lein-newnew and its repo was the only doucmentation I found and was a little outdated. The plugin is now part of Leiningen and there are a few built in templates. There is also information via lein help new.

If you want to create a template in a more automatic way from a more complete project you created, take a look at the lein-create-template Leinignen plugin.

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An effective way to have a clean and valuable commit history is to create the smallest valuable commit each time, with a descriptive commit message. This sounds obvious, but when you are in the midst of work things can get messy. Using Emacs Magit you can be highly selective as to what changes you include in each commit, down to individual characters.

This follows on from staging patches for cleaner commits with the command line, git add -p. Also see how to drive Git with Emacs and Magit for more background.

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Continuing my modeline customisation with powerline, I wanted to add colour to match the Cyberpunk theme of Emacs Live. To do this I copied the default them and custmised it, adding colours and chaning the style of seperatr. Here is how I customised the powerline code to make my own theme.

See how I previously tweaked Emacs modeline with powerline, as this article carries on from that. My modeline also includes an earlier tweak for the minor modes.

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It important to enjoy the development tools you use day after day, so after seeing some of the great looking Emacs modeline customisations, I couldnt resist pimping my modeline (again).

Previously I tweaked the modeline for Clojure development, this time I’ve added styling to the modeline using powerline. I aim to create a modeline worthy of the rest of the Emacs Live experience.

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CIDER is the Clojure IDE and REPL for Emacs. It is built on top of nREPL, the Clojure networked REPL server and replaces the direct use of nREPL in Emacs.

In this article we are using CIDER that is packaged in Emacs Live, a very complete, well organised and extensible configuration for Clojure and many other things in Emacs.

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