Matthew Ratzke Clojure Remote 2017 Interview

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Matthew Ratzke will be giving a talk at Clojure Remote 2017. He will be speaking about Hoplon and Feathers.js.

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Follow him on Twitter, GitHub, Medium, and his homepage.

PurelyFunctional.tv: How did you get into Clojure?

Matthew Ratzke: I had been working in the IT industry as a System Admin, building scripts and utility applications for years, basically DevOps before anyone knew what that was.

I started working on an automation platform for IT that would let me simplify my work, eventually I came to realize the problems with building something complex and dynamic, comes down to the language itself. At the time a friend of mine was pushing me to learn Lisp, so I looked around the internet and found a few dialects that I liked and started reading. I watched video lectures and read whitepapers until I had enough of an understanding to start building something. Out of all of this self-learning I eventually found Clojure, six months later I quit my job as a System Admin and founded my startup Degree9. Now we build custom DevOps solutions using Clojure/ClojureScript.

PF.tv: What is your talk about?

MR: We will be building a Chat application and giving a tutorial/walkthrough on how to do so with Hoplon/Feathers.js.

PF.tv: Who is your talk for?

MR: Anyone interested in building web applications, with or without a server component. It will be targeted towards developers familiar with ClojureScript however knowledge of the libraries/technologies used is not required.

PF.tv: What do you hope people will take away from the talk?

MR: A few things. From a high-level I want users to get a different perspective on how to structure applications, and the benefits of using a single language for both the client and server. In practice, I will be covering how to initialize a Hop lon/Feathers application. How Hoplon can be used to structure and build your application and how your client and server components should mirror each other.

PF.tv: What concepts do you recommend people be familiar with to maximize their experience with the talk?

MR: Being familiar with other Clojure(Script) technologies such as Reagent/Re-Frame or ring, etc.

Feathers server components are very similar to nodejs/express.

PF.tv: What resources are available for people who want to study up before the talk?

MR:

PF.tv: Where can people follow you online?

PF.tv: Are there any projects you'd like people to be aware of? How can people help out?

MR: Presentation Repo

Community Projects:

My Projects

The Hoplon community is the best place to meet people and contribute to the projects.

PF.tv: Where do you see the state of Clojure in 10 years?

MR: Probably one of the most influential languages in the next wave of technology.

PF.tv: If Clojure were an animal, what animal would it be?

MR: I don't think it would be, Clojure is more like DNA.