Bonus: Heart of Clojure Preview

All the talks I'm looking forward to in Belgium next week

🇧🇪 I’ll be speaking next week at Heart of Clojure in Belgium. It’s not too late to get your tickets for 10% off with this magic coupon link.

🇺🇸 And the Clojure Conj is happening at the end of October. The schedule is out and it looks fantastic. Sadly, I won’t be there. It’s always such a great event. You should get your tickets before they run out.

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Bonus: Heart of Clojure Preview

I have the honor of closing Heart of Clojure with a keynote talk. Yesterday, I rehearsed it in front of a local group of Clojurists and it hit all of the notes I wanted it to. There are a couple of minor improvements to make. It’s all about practice and polish at this point.

I have to admit that I didn’t look closely at the schedule while I was preparing my talk. But now that it’s ready, I’m ready to take a look. And there are some amazing speakers and topics. I want to go through each one and make comments on why I am looking forward to them and why they’re important to the community. Let’s get started.

Lu Wilson - What it means to be open

The show opens with a keynote from Lu Wilson. If you don’t know Lu, she creates cool videos, neat playgrounds, codes at tldraw, and researches at the illustrious Ink & Switch.

Besides just wanting to meet her, her talk looks important, too. Making progress on my projects is always difficult, but sharing that progress is harder still. I want to learn from someone who does produce such cool stuff and does it with style, vulnerability, and grace.

Anna Colom - From hype to responsibility: what works and matters for whom in data and AI?

I have to admit that I hadn’t heard of Anna, but her credentials are legit. She’s a researcher and former journalist, so this talk promises to be hard hitting. AI is on everybody’s mind right now. This talk can help bring a needed perspective to the discussion.

Sami Kallinen - Sailing with Scicloj: A Bayesian Adventure

I wish I knew more about the Scicloj community. They are so active, yet I find it hard to find a way in. I’m excited for this talk (and a related one at the Conj by Thomas Clark) because this might be the way in.

Jeaye Wilkerson - An Exceptionally Janky Tale

Jeaye comes from the game programming world. And he’s writing a compiler for Clojure to the LLVM. I love compiler talks, so this should be fun!

Daniel Szmulewicz - The Shoulders of Giants or Uncovering the Foundational Ideas of Lisp

You might know that I think it’s a shame that computer science doesn’t teach its own history. It’s one of the reasons I read papers on my podcast. The talk description makes it clear that he’s aware of how poorly we understand our history, and he wants to correct that.

Mitesh Shah - Beyond the Hype: Obstacles on the Path to Clojure Adoption

I’m skeptical that Clojure will ever be a top 10 programming language. It’s actually amazing to me that it is on the charts at all. That being said, I do find it weird that I still hear people use Clojure as an example of an obscure, novel, impractical language choice. It’s certainly not obscure, it’s 14 years old, and super practical.

Although I’m skeptical that we can “propel Clojure” anywhere, I am hopeful that “openly discussing the issues” can help us learn more about ourselves.

Lovro Lugović & Sung-Shik Jongmans - Klor: Choreographic Programming in Clojure

Who doesn’t like distributed systems? Other than that, the description is rather mysterious.

Dimitris Kyriakoudis - TimeLines: Crafting a Live Coding Musical Instrument with & out of Clojure

I remember Sam Aaron said something about Overtone which I now have to paraphrase: “Overtone lets you leverage your programming skill to apply music theory to make music.” Ever since I heard that, I fantasized about using Clojure to make music. This talk seems to deliver. I also appreciate the new, formalized model of instrument as pure function of time.

Jeremy Taylor - Richer SQL — Steering SQL's Future Towards Clojure's Philosophy

Ah, SQL. It’s a logic programming language that everyone learns to hate. I once wrote a Datalog to SQL compiler. It was a hack, but it let you build your queries up using data. I imagine that the folks at JUXT have come up with something better than what I cooked up, but we’ll have to watch the talk to find out.

Paweł Stroiński - Building Conversational Speech Annotation Tool in Clojure

This talk sounds like a lovely personal experience story of using ClojureScript, replete with ups, downs, and a warm ending.

Felix Alm - Squint: a taste of Clojure for JavaScript devs

Squint is an interesting project. It’s Clojure syntax that compiles to JavaScript, but without Clojure’s data structures. The talk’s description states that it’s a way to insert ClojureScript flavor into existing JavaScript code. Interesting idea.

Philippa Markovics & Martin Kavalar - Staring into the PLFZABYSS - From the IBM AS/400 to Clojure & Datomic

This talk has an adventure story vibe for a legacy to Clojure migration.

James Reeves - Living With Legacy Code

James Reeves is the creator of Hiccup and the maintainer of Ring. Unlike the previous talk, this talk looks like a discussion of how to live with legacy code.

Eric Normand - The Wonders of Abstraction

This is my talk! I will be attending. But let me just say that my slides are done, it’s maybe the least technical talk of the conference, and it tells a story that starts 2.6 million years ago and that ends with your hands on the keyboard. I hope you like it!

There are a number of workshops and special sessions happening as well. The biggest problem is having to miss the concurrent talk! Here they are:

Chris McCormick - Build full-stack ClojureScript apps with and without Sitefox

I’m interested in Chris comparing the options we have for building web apps with ClojureScript.

Katja Böhnke - Open hearts for diversity

This appears to be an open sharing session for discussion issues of diversity in the industry.

Dimitris Kyriakoudis - Overtone / TidalCycles

Live live coded music.

pulu - UFORAVE!timewarp

More live live coded music.

Jack Rusher & Paolo Holinski - An introduction to application.garden

A workshop to learn to make application.garden applications.

Colin Fleming - Cursive office hours

Office hours to learn more about Cursive, the IntelliJ-based Clojure IDE. This is a special treat because Colin lives in New Zealand.

Nikita Prokopov - Build a Desktop Application with Humble UI

I’ve been programming on the web for a long time. Because the GUI is so developed there, it always draws me back in, even when the app I’m writing could just as easily live on my machine. Nikita is the author of Humble UI and he’s going to teach us how to use it to build cross-platform desktop apps without the web.

Live defn podcast recording

This might be fun to watch if you’re a fan of the podcast.

Michiel Borkent, Teodor Heggelund, & Christian Johansen - Babashka in practice

I started using Babashka for real a few months ago and it was so nice to be able to write small scripts in Clojure instead of Bash. So nice. But I’m far from an expert at it. I’d love to get hands on experience with the creator of it, Michiel Borkent.

Grab a ticket and I’ll see you there!