By Daniel Compton

Clojurists Together is excited to announce the two projects that are being funded in Q1 2018: clj-http and Figwheel!

Recap

For those who are new to Clojurists Together, our goal is simple: Fund critical Clojure open-source projects to keep them healthy and sustainable. Clojure companies and individual developers sign up for a monthly contribution, and we pick projects to fund each quarter. This is our first funding cycle since launching.

clj-http

clj-http is one of the most popular Clojure open source projects, with over 3 million downloads on Clojars. It is maintained by Lee Hinman. It’s used by quite a few other clients as a base HTTP client.

Lee’s plans for the next three months:

“I’d like some dedicated time to addressing bugs and adding new features that has slowed down a bit in the past. Recently it had to move away from deprecated APIs, and while most of the functionality was kept, there is still a lot of cleaning up to do and missing features that need to be re-implemented. Recently there was also async support merged, and this needs to be enhanced so it can be a first-class usage of clj-http. Additionally, there is a lot of features that the Apache HTTP client exposes that clj-http doesn’t nicely encapsulate. It would be great if these could be available to developers.”

Figwheel

Figwheel is one of ClojureScript’s secret weapons, enabling ridiculously high productivity via live-reloading ClojureScript code. It is maintained by Bruce Hauman. It is one of the most used ClojureScript tools in the community.

Bruce’s plans for the next three months:

“The Figwheel codebase is an exploration of the problem space of creating a friendly ClojureScript. As a UI to ClojureScript the codebase is complex and complected. I would love to devote a solid 3 months to working solely on Figwheel. I would like to revisit its functionality and condense it down into an architecture and a set of libraries that will allow it to be reused in other contexts (i.e boot etc.) more easily. For example: other projects should be able to use a figwheel’s compiler wrapper that produces attractive error messages, or perhaps just figwheel’s error message parsing code. I would also us the time to explore feedback for spec errors at runtime. Most importantly, I’d like to set Figwheel up for a long future of service to the Clojure community.”

Funding details

When we announced Clojurists Together, we had planned to offer the successful projects funding at $150/hour for a specified number of hours (dependent on funds). After discussions with Software Freedom Conservancy, our host organisation, we have changed this to be a fellowship style grant, similar to the Segment Open Source Fellowship. In practice this amounts to the same thing: funding open source developers to improve their projects. For this funding cycle, each project is receiving $1,800USD/mo for three months.

Q2 Funding

We had a bunch of good applications from great projects and would have liked to fund several more projects if we had more money. If you’d like to see more projects get funded, then please join. If you applied for the last funding cycle, you are able to re-use that application to apply for Q2. If you maintain a Clojure/ClojureScript project that is important to the community, consider applying for funding so we can help you keep it sustainable.

Lastly, a big thank you to all of our members. We couldn’t have done it without your support.