Bonus: Clojure Conj Preview

All the talks and why they're important

Clojure Conj is coming up at the end of October. I can’t make it, but I will watch the talks with a local meetup. You can still grab tickets.

I’ve been to the Conj many times and I always have a good time. Can you imagine ~400 Clojure programmers all sharing a space, with their minds primed with amazing talks? It’s so nice to know you can talk to everyone about all the geeky topics you’re into.

In this email, I’m going to go over all of the talks and comment on the abstracts. These are my interpretations of what the talks are about based on the information available and my own personal feelings about each one.

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Joe Lane - Transactor Performance: Theory & Practice

This is a Datomic talk. The transactor is the central hub of the Datomic database where data is written and is the source of truth. I guess because it’s a bottleneck on writes, its performance is very important.

Joel Martin - Tools that Enable Data-Driven and Containerized Testing of Multi-Service Networked Systems

I actually worked at the same company as Joel for a while and we had some deep discussions. He and the colleagues on his team developed a very cool simulator system for testing large networks of computers virtually—so you don’t need to set up thousands of computers on a network to understand its behavior.

Caique Lima - Deploying ML models in a Clojure environment

The first AI talk in the schedule! This looks like an experience report of how Nubank deploys Python models written by Data Scientists in their Clojure microservice system.

Steven Lombardi - Introducing a lightweight, data-first Clojure interpreter for tracing code

This talk introduces a new developer tool for learning about how your code works called Paper Trail. I couldn’t find anything on Google about it. If you like developer tools, this looks like a cool talk.

Allen Rohner - Breaking the bank with test.contract

I’m all about “generative testing” where you generate random inputs to a system and make sure it behaves how it should. test.contract is for testing stateful code, which is actually quite hard to do. I have a talk and a course about it and when I look at the difficulty of it, I shake my head. I hope this library makes it easier.

Stepan Parunashvili - Building a Sync Engine in Clojure

I fantasize about having a system that lets me write offline-first apps that store their own data—and having synching taken care of by somebody else. Synching is so hard to do! I hope this talk has some good stuff in it.

Chris Oakman - Introducing Standard Clojure Style: no-fuss code formatting

This is a JavaScript tool for formatting Clojure code. I’m interested in details of the implementation:

• Why JavaScript?

• Is there a custom parser?

• How does it compare to cljfmt?

Andrew Foltz-Morrison - Clojure for Criminal Defense

This talk description is all over the map. But the core seems good: I’m really interested in using Clojure for data science.

Arne Brasseur - The Next Ten Years of Overtone

Overtone is a live coding music system that has been in active use for over 10 years. I wasn’t aware that it was unstable, but it sounds like Arne et al have done heroic work to stabilize it. I can’t tell if the talk is more about the work they did or where they expect it to go in the future.

Kamil Waheed - ClojureScript Has It All! (Except Maybe for Types)

Kamil is a JavaScript dev who moved to ClojureScript and is going to talk about their experience. These talks are important because it can help spread the good new to people outside of our community.

Adam Vermeer - Exploratory Design Tools for Makers

I love the REPL and the feedback it allows. This talk seems like it wants to relate that to the design of a CAD (Computer Aided Design) UI. I’m all about good UI design and interaction, so this talk is exciting.

Wendy Randolph - When Your Disney Playlist Saves Your Tech Career

This talk looks like a personal story of the speaker’s journey to learn programming, perhaps using Disney songs as a structure. I think documenting the early days of learning to program is super important. I mentor some very new programmers and I’m constantly frustrated by how much there is to learn. How did I do it? Unfortunately, I can’t remember. It was too long ago. That’s why I’m looking forward to Wendy’s talk.

Diana Belle - Game Development in Clojure

Since I was a kid, I dreamed of making my own computer games. I don’t know if I’ll ever make one. I think my interest in making games is similar to my interest in making music. I’m not that interested in music, but I wish I were. Analogously, I don’t play games, but for some reason the idea of making one intrigues me. There’s something about building a little world.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to this talk because Diana’s game is at the complexity level of something I can imagine making.

Wesley Matson - Developers aren't paid to code

Another AI talk! But this one is about how to remain relevant. The title points to something that I believe in, that developers are there to solve problems, not write code. However, I find that at many companies, the incentives are set up to reward code. I’d like to see how this talk deals with that conflict.

Chris Badahdah - Portal - Exploring new Workflows with Visual Tools

This is a developer workflow talk focused on Portal. I’ve never used Portal, and I tend to be very conservative with tools I use, but this abstract reminds me of why it’s important to dedicate some time to exploration.

Luke VanderHart - RDF and the future of LLMs

Another AI talk! This abstract seems to suggest that RDF might be a way for LLMs to become more useful at being part of our applications. Okay, I’m intrigued.

Derek Schatzlein & Jack Mocherman - Transducing Healthcare: Clojure Transducers as Clinical Features

This is one of the talk abstracts that goes over my head. There are just too many terms I don’t know and that I have no luck with looking up on Google. So I have to guess what it’s about.

It seems like there’s some code that needs to run on lots of data as it streams in from doctors making notes on their patients. So this healthcare company created a system of “serverless” functions that run the code. They’re going to talk about how they did that.

Timothy Pratley & Chris Houser - Crafting Artisanal Vector Graphics by Blending Creativity with Precision

This talk is another reminder of how many tools are out there that I’ve never heard of. The speakers will combine “REPL shortcuts”, Clay, and Portal (second time this was mentioned) to draw SVG diagrams dynamically to explain things better. I’m very interested!

Christoph Neumann - Clojure in live sports television

This abstract tries to up the stakes: Failure is not an option! The promise of the abstract is super compelling: “See how to build low-latency integrations with no downtime or data loss.”

Paula Gearon - From JVM to JS: Implementing Math Functions in ClojureScript

Paula wrote the cross-platform math routines for Clojure and ClojureScript in clojure.math. This seems like an experience report of the design decisions and engineering work that had to be done.

Tim Ewald & Paul deGrandis - Immutable Values in the Big Wide World

The abstract starts with a very strong statement: “The future of cloud native architectures is not serverless functions or containerized code access remote stores. It is ubiquitous quasi-infinite storage accessed by machines with a lot of memory running runtimes that can use it.” Wow, this is a big topic.

The second half of the abstract seems a lot more down to earth with experience reports and a practical system. But I have to admit: I am intrigued!

Carin Meier & Marlon Silva - Real-World AI Integration: An Experience Report on Enhancing Engineering Workflows

Another AI talk. Though, to be fair, Carin has been doing AI talks for a decade. This talk is about how to use AI to help developer productivity.

Thomas Clark - Scientific Clojure, a bird's-eye view

Scicloj is one of those organizations that, from the outside, is super impressive. However, my attempts at learning how to do data science with Clojure have always failed. It’s just so hard to know where to start, make all the library decisions correctly, and also figure out how to do data science. I hope this talk helps that.

Michael Simonson - Architecting Threat Intelligence with Clojure in Cybersecurity Detection & Response

I have trouble getting excited about cybersecurity (just my personal interests speaking). Can Clojure really “revolutionize” it? Skeptical!

Cam Saul - Getting 50,000 Companies on Board with Clojure

A “tips and lessons” talk about using Clojure in popular projects.

Jordan Miller & Rafal Dittwald - Teaching Clojure Together

Yes! These two speakers are legit great teachers. I’m super excited to hear their experience building Clojure Camp.

Colin Fleming - Enhancing LLM-Powered Development with Clojure's REPL

More AI! This one is for LLM integration with your IDE and the REPL from the creator of Cursive IDE.

Alex Miller - Design in Practice in Practice

This talk has a very short description. But it’s probably about Clojure 1.12’s new features, the design decisions behind it, and some future features that the core team is currently working on.

Hanna Figueiredo Mariano - The Amazing Day of Datomic

This is a separately paid workshop that happens the day before the conference starts. It’s for beginners to Datomic.

Board Game Night

I love the board game nights at the conference. You basically have time for one or two games. It’s fun and a great way to meet new people.

That’s it! Buy your tickets now.