Clojure Conj Recap

November 20, 2013

Unfortunately, I was only able to attend 2 of the 3 days of the Conj. But, as with the previous year, I enjoyed myself immensely. When you get a bunch of bright people together, the quality of talks, and the individual conversations, are great.

There was a good mixture of theory and practice talks. I would hesitate to call them themes, but several talks touched on contract-like things, both internal to a program, and external to a program. (Specifically, for web services and Datomic databases.) I quite liked the 2 talks that bookended the second day: Carin Meier's talk about speech acts, which involved a demo of a talking computer and a Parrot drone, and Tim Ewald's talk on hand tools, which taught me more about wood working than I ever expected at a programming conference. But that's how the Conj rolls.

In the Unsessions Thursday night, I went to 3 very applied talks. 2 dealt with JVM and Clojure performance. The other was by the maintainers of Immutant, which is a pretty awesome Clojure app server. If you need such a thing, I can't recommend it highly enough.

It's unfortunate that I needed to leave early, but the conversations I had with @ohpauleez, @jensmithco, @dougselph, @tcrawley, @webyrd and many others were, as always, great.

I look forward to next year, and maybe I'll even make it to Clojure West this year.