Nick Shook Clojure Remote 2017 Speaker Interview
Nick Shook will be giving a keynote at Clojure Remote 2017. He will be speaking about using Clojure on AWS.
Follow him on Twitter and GitHub.
PurelyFunctional.tv: How did you get into Clojure?
Nick Shook: I got introduced to Clojure from some coworkers when I worked at Pololu, but it was mostly educational; I never built a production app with it. However, once I got hooked with Lambda and Serverless, Clojure seemed like an amazing match with its code-as-data syntax. I've been working with this combo full time for almost half a year now and fully expect to be doing this for a while.
PF.tv: What is your talk about?
NS: Leveraging AWS and Clojure to create a cost-effective and secure serverless architecture. I will walk through an example of setting up a serverless JSON web-based API beginning with an empty AWS account and using AWS services like CloudFormation, VPC, API Gateway, Cognito, CloudWatch, and RDS.
PF.tv: Who is your talk for?
NS: Somewhat experienced developers. I think it's fair to say that I hope you (the audience) have deployed a production app before.
PF.tv: What do you hope people will take away from the talk?
NS: An understanding of serverless architecture in general and how to create/maintain one on AWS.
PF.tv: What concepts do you recommend people be familiar with to maximize their experience with the talk?
NS: Aside from being familiar with the Clojure language if you knew how to create an Uberjar with Leiningen and are also familiar with YAML you should be good to go.
PF.tv: What resources are available for people who want to study up before the talk?
NS: This article from AWS has what one needs to write lambda functions in Clojure.
PF.tv: Where can people follow you online?
NS: @shicholas but preferably, email me at nick@1337lawyers.com.
PF.tv: Are there any projects you'd like people to be aware of? How can people help out?
NS: My primary motivation for 1337 Lawyers is to write software that increases access to justice.There are a ton of great projects out there worth contributing to, including anything by the EFF, Open Law Library, and your great local legal aid charities (a great example in Vegas where I'm from is Legal Aid Center of Southern Nevada).
PF.tv: Where do you see the state of Clojure in 10 years?
NS: I hope Clojure start-up times are improved by >90% and I can use Clojure everywhere without abandon. Though probably, ClojureScript becomes more common than Clojure as node becomes the runtime of the world (making this talk by Gary Bernhardt almost prophetic).
PF.tv: If Clojure were an animal, what animal would it be?
NS: A sloth. Like a sloth, Clojure only does what it needs, nothing more, nothing less :).
