Clojure Helsinki Meetup - January 2019

 Posted on January 20, 2019  |  

We had the pleasure and honor to host this year’s first Clojure Helsinki Meetup at Siili Solutions office. Here are my notes about the event.

Agenda for the evening was planned as such:

  • 17:15 doors open, free discussion

  • 17:30 opening words from the host (Heimo Laukkanen / Siili)

  • 17:35 Write yourself a compiler in Clojure: Dhall edition (Fabrizio Ferrai)

  • 18:20 Developer experience of deploying Clojure in four big PaaS providers (Yrjö Kari-Koskinen / Futurice)

  • 18:55 The Clojure ecosystem in Finland (workshop; facilitators: Panu Kalliokoski and Heimo Laukkanen)

  • 19:40 What should a Clojure/LISP editor be like? (Rakhim Davletkaliyev / Codexpanse)

We had 42 clojurists join us to see great presentations, mingle with likeminded people and collaborate on ideating possibilities for this year’s community activities.

Fabrizio continued on Dhall topics, now discussing his experiences on writing the compiler.

See the talk here

Yrjö shared his experiences on deploying Clojure on PaaS services. And though each platform has improved since his last try, it was a good presentation about how to approach this kind of comparison question. Could be fun to redo similar test after a while, but testing new capabilities that platforms offer. For example deployment as a docker image.

See Yrjö’s talk here

Rakhim’s talk explored what could future programming environments look and be like, and how different types of ways of making sense about dataflow and functions could allow also more diverse groups of people to get into programming.

See Rakhim’s presentation here

Besides presentations, we also had a small workshop on what we could do as a community this year.

First, we discussed things we already like in the community – things we want to keep and appreciate.

Common themes among others were the spirit, atmosphere, and fun we have. That the community is a genuinely nice programmer community, where people really care about programming and are nice human beings. ClojuTre got big love, as well as Clojure Bridge.

People expressed interest to both technical presentations as well as to discussions about how people are using Clojure to solve problems in their cases – something which we might have had a bit less in presentation topics. We also discussed that it would be great to collaborate more within this community on how to convince people to try and embrace Clojure more, both for fun and profit.

Overall people genuinely appreciated the idea of having regular meetups, where they have the possibility to collaborate with and meet other Clojure enthusiasts outside their regular working environment. Especially as the community in Finland is not that big, and we do not necessarily have a good environment where to come together and collaborate online. Clojurians slack is sometimes so busy with chatter that Finland channel history gets erased before you have time to read what is going on there.

So what could we do in 2019?

Few really interesting themes emerged:

  • organize more low barrier of entry activities that are also beginner friendly

  • collaborate on improving libraries in Clojure ecosystem with hackathons ( for example around our favorite Metosin components )

  • collaborate on funding / supporting important developments in the Clojure ecosystem

  • collect real data on Clojure community and usage in Finland ( who uses, how many people working with Clojure, what kind of cases are being done with Clojure, how many companies are offering consultants with Clojure experience )

  • organize events/roundtables for companies using Clojure in their systems

  • share more case stories & experiences on how Clojure is used to solve problems in real life situations

  • reach out to Clojure communities outside Finland, as well as to non-Clojure communities here in Finland

We did not have time to process these ideas and possibilities further during the meetup so the discussions and actions will continue.

I know I already promised to do few presentations about customer cases I know of and have ( or will get ) permission to talk about. I will also share our notes and thoughts from Dutch Clojure Days in April or May.

What would you like to contribute to?

Join Clojurians Finland channel and continue the discussion!