Highlights from ClojuTRE 2019
ClojuTRE 2019, a Clojure and Functional Programming conference wrapped up last week in Helsinki, Finland. In this post, I would like to highlight the talks that I personally enjoyed a lot.
Be sure to check out all the videos on YouTube.
Day 1
The first day started off with the FP track.
Fabrizio Ferrai kicked things off with a talk on building and maintaining a package manager. His talk was a graceful blend of humor and insightful/painful lessons learned along the way. If you have some free time and you’re looking for a talk that will make you laugh and hopefully learn something about package management and why you should not roll your own, then this is a great session to watch.
Nir Rubinstein chatted about the philosophy of language. A focal point of Nir’s talk was the seven principles outlined in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, a book by Ludwig Wittgenstein. If you like to learn how linguistic philosophy, relates closely to what we do in our everyday lives as programmers, then you will enjoy this talk.
Daniel Slutsky has been working with the various maintainers of data science-related Clojure libraries (go checkout scicloj). He shared a couple of examples of the work he’s been doing to bring Clojure and R closer together and to improve the data science story for Clojure. If you’re into data science, then definitely watch this talk.
Next up was a great talk on Computer Mathematics, AI and Functional Programming by Moa Johansson. Moa knows an incredible amount about the history in this domain, and her talk included a demo of a program discovering/solving mathematical proofs.
Richard Feldman gave an entertaining talk entitled “Why Isn’t Functional Programming the Norm?” which centered around the evolution of mainstream programming languages that happen to be OOP, but the reasons that he deduces for this are not quite what you’d expect. A fun and educational talk that goes into great depth about the history of programming languages.
Fotis Papadogeorgopoulos gave a great talk on “Keeping sites accessible with types”. This is definitely an area where many developers could put in that little bit of extra time and attention which would result in a better world for the people that rely on assistive technologies such as screen readers. If you’d like to make their lives a little better, his talk is a great place to start — it has links to many resources that can help.
Andrea Leopardi is one of the core maintainers of Elixir and gave a Sightseeing Tour of the language, its features, how decisions are made around the maintenance of the language and its evolution over time.
Day 1 closed with a funky after party where CASSALPOPOLO was making music with #Haskell code.
Day 2
Day 2 started with a free Crux tutorial session. If you want to go on a Crux Earth Assignment and learn (more) about Crux, you should check out their tutorial — A Tale of Time and Space.
The first talk of the second day was Eetu Kaivola's — he talked about his experience learning “Clojure as first professional language” as part of the Master & Apprentice program in his company. I was glad to see that here, @GR-Tech we are also following a similar approach when it comes to hiring and training engineers that com from a non-Clojure background.
Valtteri Harmainen was next up and he shared how he managed to create his own Clojure job and how it worked out so far.
Michiel Borkent showed us some of the cool features of clj-kondo, “a linter that sparks joy”. If you’ve ever watched Marie Kondo, you’ll understand where the inspiration for the project comes from. I would highly recommend trying clj-kondo out and watching his talk.
Tommi Reiman, gave an interesting talk on strategies for analyzing the performance of Clojure code using tools like flame graphs and shared some handy tips on ways to significantly improve the speed of your code. I highly recommend watching the video.
Jack Rusher gave a talk on “Computational Creativity” and inspired the creative side of the audience with his various animations, funky visuals, and ideas about the creative mind.
Dave Snowden’s talk on “Dealing with unanticipated needs” was probably the highlight of the conference for me. Fantastic, philosophical talk with very thought-provoking content. I couldn’t do it justice trying to summarize it, so it’s best if you go and watch the video on your own.
Håkan Råberg spoke about the internals and design decisions around Crux and clearly had a solid understanding of it as he spoke at great speed to cover the breadth of information he was trying to share with the audience. You can check out his video here.
Alex Miller from Cognitect was the closing keynote and it was a delight to see someone from the Clojure core team give a talk in person.
He talked about his path as a programmer, from childhood, all the way through to his interview process with Cognitect. Another interesting talk with some good insights that were funny (because they were true).
Alex also talked about the processes that he and Rich Hickey use to plan & communicate with each other, about spec and some of the nice features coming to spec v2. Another great talk well worth the watch.
Day 2 closed with an afterparty at one of the sponsor's offices (Gofore). Fun fact — most offices in Finland have a “no shoes policy” — resulting in more relaxed and productive workers :)
Extras
Clojure is thriving in Finland for sure. If you’re wondering why (as I was) check out the post below:
TL;DR
I really liked the single-track format of ClojuTRE as I didn’t have to miss anything and I got exposure to some talks I might not have chosen.
I’ve attended local tech conferences before and had been wondering if there is really any value in traveling to attend a conference someplace else since all of the videos will be available on YouTube anyway.
While I can probably get a lot just by watching the recordings, it was really nice to have an opportunity to chat with the speakers, hear stories from other attendees & companies all around the world who have adopted Clojure and learn more about the problems they are solving whether it’s related to recruiting, training or coding.
Again, be sure to check out all the videos on YouTube.
