Michael Drogalis Clojure/West 2017 Interview

Michael Drogalis will be giving a talk at Clojure/West 2017. He will be speaking about Pyroclast Data Processing.

Follow him on his hompage, GitHub and Twitter.

PurelyFunctional.tv: How did you get into Clojure?

Michael Drogalis: I got hooked on Clojure when I was in college. I had been doing hardcore Java for a few years, and the proposition of being able to bring all of my existing JVM knowledge to an unexpectedly strong language was enough to get me to take a glance.

PF.tv: What is your talk about?

MD: The talk I'll be giving is about Pyroclast - a commercial event streaming platform built on top of Onyx. I'll be focusing on how we used Clojure to engineer a development experience for end users that reduces the dev/compile/test cycle from minutes into milliseconds. We make heavy use of simulation and an advanced incremental compiler, maintaining a shadow program as users develop their event streaming pipelines. All of this depends extensively on prior work both in the Clojure language and ecosystem.

PF.tv: Who is your talk for?

MD: This talk is for anyone interested in event stream processing, Onyx, or scalable data processing with Clojure.

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

MD: I'm hoping to show how one can take the concepts that we admire in Clojure and elevate them to the product level. The same "aha!" moment that we experience as Clojurists can be had by any developer if framed in a particular way.

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

MD: Having some familiarity with distributed streaming architectures would be helpful, but isn't required.

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

MD: I'd recommend watching the excellent [Turning the Database

Inside Out](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fU9hR3kiOK0) talk.

PF.tv: Where can people follow you online?

MD: I'm @MichaelDrogalis on Twitter, and sometimes blog at http://www.onyxplatform.org and http://pyroclast.io.

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

MD: It's probably worth being familiar with the Onyx Platform before attending the talk since a lot of the design and architecture I'll be discussing is dependent on its model.

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

MD: A Lamb. Duh. (λ :)