Dinner, Opportunity, and Live Reloading

Clojure Gazette

Issue 1.98October 19, 2014

Editorial

Hi Clojurists,

Clojure/conj is coming up. It's a month away. I've been lucky enough to find a way to go, including arranging with my wife and daughter, who are very supportive. But my luck is even greater, because by writing the Pre-Conj Prep emails, I've been able to digitally meet many of the speakers.

It has also forced me to get organized about the conference. Instead of just jumping on the plane and attending, I really want to make the most of my time. I'm working on a schedule, but I should tell you what I know now in case you are interested in planning around it.

Saturday, November 22 (the day the conference ends), I am organizing a dinner at a restaurant within walking distance of the hotel and venue. You should come! I would also like to use the afternoon to go to a Smithsonian museum, probably Air & Space to see the Wright Brothers exhibit. I'm sure I'll have the plans firm next week, so I'll let you know.

Rock on!
Eric Normand

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Sponsor: Clojure/conj

Have you ever wanted to be in a room of 500 Clojurists, all pondering parens, talking shop, and learning what's happening with Clojure? Clojure/conj is coming up and it's not too late to buy tickets. Come share the single-track experience. Check out previous conference videos .

Regular priced tickets are sold out, but Cognitect has offered some regular priced tickets just for Gazette readers. They're first-come-first-serve. Just use coupon code ClojureGazette when you buy them .

Clojure/conj Opportunity Grants

Strange Loop doubled the percentage of women who attended this year over last year. One of the big drivers was their Diversity Scholarship program. Clojure/conj is doing something very similar. They want to increase the number of people from under-represented groups, so they're issuing grants. But the number of applicants was higher than expected. It must be working! They need our help to fly out as many applicants as possible to the conference.

This is momentous for so many reasons. There is something stirring in the air. People are becoming more and more aware of the lack of diversity, the harrassment, and the systematic oppression. And people are taking action. I can't claim that I'm doing that much myself. In fact, I'm probably just another part of the problem. But there's a wave cresting, and if you ever considered giving some money to this cause, now is the time to see it have the biggest impact your dollars ever might.

Frankly, women, transexuals, homosexuals, blacks, and countless others are heroes for facing the abuse they receive for doing nothing more than exercising their freedoms. If a little money can help bring an equal footing, even at a fringe language conference, then count me in. They are accepting individual donations , or if you have the possibility to persuade your company, there are larger sponsorships available .

FP Days

If you can't make it to Clojure/conj this year, but you can make it to London, FP Days is for you. It's happening at the same time. It's capped at 150 attendees to ensure a personal feel. Get your tickets because the price keeps going up.

Arcadia 0.1a Launched

The Clojure in Unity 3D project has been named Arcadia. It's now available. Watch the Strange Loop talk about it to see how it works.

Rich Hickey Q&A

An older interview conducted by Michael Fogus asking Rich Hickey questions about Clojure. Great answers to some great questions.

My Tribute to Steve Ballmer

Not really about Steve Ballmer, this article goes through some image processing steps to convert images to ascii renditions, all in Clojure.

Introducing Elm Reactor

Elm's Time Traveling Debugger turned some heads when it first came out. Well, they've been working on it ever since and now it has a really nice feature set. They've worked out the UI for it and, well, there's never been a better time to get into Elm.

Chestnut

A Leiningen template for getting live reloading of ClojureScript code set up from the get go. Start with this template and you can start coding ClojureScript right away.

Why We're Learning Clojure

A nice take on why a company that is heavily invested in Rails might use Clojure for some projects.

Zero downtime Clojure Deployments

uSwitch uses a micro-service architecture, so there are lots of small servers running all over the place. Combine this with fast, iterative development and the JVM's long startup time means that any time a new service is deployed, there is a gap between the last request handled by the old service and the first request handled by the new service. This article talks about a way to switch over without losing any availability.

Chatting cats use DataScript for fun

Datascript is a simple implementation of the Datomic data model in ClojureScript. It lets you store data in a flat log and query it to extract out a tree of your choosing. This long article goes through the creation of a chat application using Datascript, with some good lessons learned at the end.