November 24, 2020

Talks: Clojure's Superpower

For about a decade, I used to speak regularly at conferences and user groups around the world. In 2013, I decided to take a break and just enjoy attending events (here's a small selection of my presentations covering the last three years of that decade).

Since I keep talking about a good "REPL-Driven Development" workflow on the Clojurians Slack (self sign-up here), I figured that would make a good topic to get back into speaking at virtual user group meetings.

The "talk" will mostly be a live coding session, showing some aspects that I think are important in good RDD practice and, hopefully, will be driven by audience questions -- as I want this to be an interactive experience. The pitch for the talk is:

Everyone talks about RDD but what it is really? Why is Clojure's REPL not like other languages' REPLs? Can you really develop an application "live"? What about restarts, refreshes? Don't I need special, magical tooling for this? This talk will show you how fundamental Clojure's REPL is to development, and how to build a web application, live, from your editor, with no restarts, no refreshes, just simple, basic tooling. Clojure's REPL is truly its superpower: it lets you hold your application in your hand, query it, modify it, evolve it, with just a basic set of tools and an understanding of what "REPL-friendly development" means. Here are the dates and times so far:

Tags: clojure presentations