Hello Clojure — Conference 102

❤❤ Experience at (((IN/Clojure))) conference ❤❤

Rollar Coaster, Disney Parks, Singapore by Divyendu Singh

Yesterday, I wrote about the workshop experience:

And I anticipated an awesome conference day today. Yes, you guessed it right. It was amazing :D

The order of this post is chronological (for the most part) apart from the start, I would like to start with the end. I was humbled to a part of event that ended with a panel discussion on gender bias and women in tech. This is a major problem in our industry (and beyond) and I am really happy that we are coming forward to address the issues.

My 2 cents on the issue: —

Observe your own behavior for catching implicit bias, even if you are true to your own knowledge not biased. You will be surprised after having a look at all of your actions in such an introspective fashion and once you know that the implicit bias exists, work on fixing it, knowing is half the battle.

This discussion reiterated my observation from yesterday, that I have landed inside a truly humble and welcoming community ❤

Moving on to the conference, these are kind of notes for myself, so, expect brevity, I will expand on them as I revisit the contents of conference.

Talks

On Abstraction

This was a very very good talk on the theme of abstraction (and leaky abstraction) — software construction.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00289507

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/676046.The_Sciences_of_the_Artificial

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22613.Simulacra_and_Simulation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funes_the_Memorious

Deep Learning with Cortex

This one got me excited about ML in Clojure (prior to this I have only seen ML in python land)

https://github.com/originrose/cortex

Reliable, Scalable Services with core.async

Talk about Go-esque Channels in Clojure (at least that is what I understood, will revisit it once it is online)

https://github.com/clojure/core.async

Serverless Applications with Cljs and Firebase

Another interesting talk by Jake on building games in serverless fashion. Yesterday, during the workshop I had a good reduce moment with Jake. He was also kind enough to tell me about functions like first rest and & args to help me through some workshop code :D

https://github.com/clojure/clojurescript

https://reagent-project.github.io/

http://timothypratley.blogspot.in/2017/01/reagent-deep-dive-part-1.html

https://github.com/flexsurfer/re-frisk

https://github.com/Day8/re-frame

https://github.com/jakemcc/backgammon

Elegant Error-handling for a More Civilized Age

This was a thought provoking talk, I have to revisit this one as well. Talks about ways to segregate errors from business logic. I am sure I have seen some similar error handling code in node-land.

https://github.com/varunited/demo-blogspot

Enabling One-on-One Personalized Communication with over 250 Million Users in Realtime using Clojure

Distributed message pipeline built with Kafka, Elasticsearch.

Generative, Simulation Tests in Clojure

This was another thought provoking talk on Generative, Simulation tests with Clojure. This was also a good TIL moment. I had thought about something like Generative tests before but I did not know that people are doing it in production :D

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zi0rHwfiX1Q

https://github.com/clojure/test.check

https://github.com/Datomic/simulant

Lastly,

“State machines make for great properties” — Shafeeq

ClojureScript: Good Ideas Never Die

Apart from the ideas like Running Cljs within Cljs within Cljs :D

https://github.com/anmonteiro/lumo

https://webkit.org/blog/7846/concurrent-javascript-it-can-work/

Lighting Talks

Then came the lightning talks which covered the following topics

Clojure to introspect Clojure

Mock code for tests — Spy, Stub, Mock

AWS Lambda — Step Functions

Banking Tech — democratization

Pipelines with core.async — Channels

Music Discovery Site — Recomp

Validation nested structures using clojure.spec

Panel Discussion

Spec

Library building, build vs maintain, thoughts from the best :)

Women in tech — mentioned above ❤

Lastly, I would like to thank all the organizers and community members. This was truly a wonderful experience.