General observations
- Database announcements:
- Datomic is free now
- XTDB v2 and Cloud
- Fluree
- BI and reporting for Datomic
- And many rumors about new options arriving soon
- Several non-JVM dialects of Clojure are appearing:
- ClojureDart (Dart)
- Jank (C++)
- Kalai (Rust)
- PiLisp (Dart)
- Attendance:
- Everyone was excited to be able to mingle and chat.
- Mostly returning Conj’rs.
- Lots of people, my guess is more than 500.
- Rich’s keynote was packed to capacity.
- Hiring
- There was a conspicuous absence of “we are hiring” pitches. Attendees and sponsors were recruiting customers and clients rather than employees this year.
- Swag
- Metosin had an awesome black “programmer” t-shirt, bag, and chocolate!
- The Conj trucker hat is cool
- Themes
- Appreciation of community the opportunity to congregate
- High adoption of Malli and Reitit
- Talks
- All of the talks were excellent, I highly recommend watching them on ClojureTV
- Travel
- Passing over the magnificent snow-capped mountains of America is an inspiring thing to experience.
Conversations
Toby (Shortcut)
House construction
Hiking destinations
Dr Wolf chess app
Wishes there was a mid-priced support tier for Datomic; will the free tier be less responsive now?
Jon
Thinking about how to mine his own data
Mark (Metabase)
The importance of asking “what’s the problem?”
Francis (Shortcut)
We decanted our Datomic DB
Constant time lookup was crucial to decanting
Reading the TX log, running transformations
Throwing stuff away: attributes we don’t use, entities like VCS data (we don’t need to replicate git)
Large strings
Precompute the changes we need in a database
SQLite is fast but not fast enough for billions of entities. We used an on-disk hash table. Perfect hash, immutable
We now have less work per TX, more storage runway, and 20% speedups
Backups are 7x faster
Don’t use full text index
Thinking about how to optimize blobs and working on the GraphQL API
Dan (Metabase)
Great to see a fellow member of the LiSP reading group
Paul (sovaSage)
Solving sleep apnea
It would have been nice to have more time to discuss Rich’s keynote
Daniel (Shortcut)
Made a Clojure dialect PiLisp
Pipe can be used for concatenative style
Dart is a good target, it’s fast
Evan (Shortcut)
Concerned about the rise of the unnecessary use of Kerbenutes
Denise (Viasat)
Starting a new project Java -> Clojure rewrite
Challenges of managing teams, and the value of hearing when people feel that it’s working
Launching rockets; launch delays are costly
Suggested a templates gallery of diagrams for Hummi.app would help new users figure out what they can make. Editable examples.
Aaron (Viasat)
Theory of constraints, Flying logic is awesome for diagrams, but expensive
Causal reasoning is interesting and applicable to medical/ethical questions
Love the Clojure community
Learning new things
Tight knit
Everyone is interested in what other people are doing
Less competition.
Approachability
More personal and intimate that big tech conferences
Contactable
Niche in numbers, but still able to have Clojurists together
Embracing change, things change, we evolve
I like Onyx. I used it for Climate data analysis
Jeremy Taylor (Juxt)
I’ve dedicated my life to building the cathedral of a DB XTDB, and it’s really good
Arni (Gaiwan)
New project: Ornament for styling. Particularly helpful when debugging to be able to connect named classes to your code.
BI and reporting for Datomic incoming
Dave (Kevel)
Created a music language Alda
Interested in diagrams, mostly using PlantUML, knows the → longer arrow trick.
Finn (Juxt)
Working on XTDB Cloud
Josh (RoamResearch)
Interested in seeing a demo of Hummi.app
Connor (RoamResearch)
It’s all about interface: data entry widgets and connections
We are doing everything all at once, experimenting on ideas to make the future tool for thought.
Ivan (Shortcut)
Data driven test scenario evaluator that creates and binds entities
Eli (Shortcut)
Strategy in the bird game is to gather eggs
Nathan
Mining PDF data
SQL
Lambda Island
Institutional research, students, reports, dashboards, classes need
Detective ability to explore
Nil, it’s always nil
Boolean edge cases are mysterious
Ravi (Nilenso)
Healthcare, public record
Deepa (Nilenso)
Solving hypertension. An ignored health issue tied to lifestyle.
Diagrams should be intuitive, shouldn’t be ugly
Excalidraw is good, but too much energy wasted dragging things around
Mermaid is good for seq diagrams
Jim
The best things come from one person who thinks deeply about one thing
Christophi
Recommended a book about the benefits of a diverse background: Range by David Epstein.
Chris (Treasury Prime)
Most popular project is chessboardjs from 2011, just rewrote v2 in ClojureScript
Played a lot as a youth, 1800 rated. (That means he can beat most chess players every time).
HumbleUI is awesome: Smooth, animation, save/reload
Writing a FAQ for parinfer to answer the many questions he gets about the status of the project.
Lua is convenient for plugins
Discussed HSDS and .app TLD requiring HTTPS
The sponsors are mostly consulting firms this year
Remembered my previous hallway track drawings. I haven’t been sketching this Conj, but he reminded me that I do like drawing charactures
I wish tool makers would adopt the error reporting features in Clojure 1.10+
Deps has finally overtaken Leiningen in popularity in this year’s survey.
Elango (Google)
The Clojure community is very approachable
Brandon
Saw the gap in the diagram solution space
Working with security questionnaire forms using Mali
Enjoys Clojurians Slack #ClojureScript channel
Russell
Electrical diagram layouts are tough due to the tendency towards overlapping lines
Dustin (Electric)
CSS styling spreadsheet controls
Proctor (Guaranteed Rate)
CLJS AWS Lambda functions
Kimmo (Metosin)
Lots of Clojure happening in Finland
Daniel2 (Guaranteed Rate)
Starting a new Mortgage underwriting automation (ML)
Mathew
How can we best help people learn Clojure?
Jayden
Building an e-commerce platform (like Shopify)
Interested in building a tool for thought
Carin
Book recommendation: The murderbot diaries
Janet (Freelance)
Enjoying the opportunity to network
David (Vouch)
Life is busy when you have a 5 year old!
Jeaye (EA)
Building Jank
Cling is a pain because releases are inconsistent
Yes, you can use .cljc instead of .jank if you want to
let* instead of let
Pricing drives perceptions of quality
Rich
Turns up to the talks, mixes with everyone
Design, preparing to design, stuff happens before you can design
There’s more to it than hammock time
Communicating progress and backtracking
Tickets
Define the problem
List possible solutions
Create a criteria for evaluating solutions
Sleep on it before you code
Diagrams are useful for planning and documenting