Elevator Pitch
After years of laboring in Java you feel the call for something better. Scala, Kotlin, and Clojure seem like worthy quests. Will you choose familiarity or power? Will you master these powers to defeat evil? Join me as I describe my own monomythical journey to Clojure and help you as you begin yours.
Description
The path to Clojure is a common pattern which parallels the literary Hero’s Journey, or Monomyth. In the monomyth, a hero goes on a quest, faces and overcomes trials, and returns home a changed individual. In the Clojure story, we often start in the drudgery and unproductivity of enterprise languages and patterns. At some point we want something better, but errantly steer away from all those parenthesis. Once we do accept the quest to learn Clojure there can be many challenges and trials along the way. Finally, we learn how to successfully wield Clojure in our regular jobs as changed, more productive, happier people.
In this talk I will relate my own journey to Clojure with the goal of helping you both understand the journey and, especially, help you fast track through some of the common trials and challenges that beset the novice to intermediate Clojurian.
Key parts of the journey that I will discuss from my own perspective and perhaps yours are:
- Departure/Thesis: You are an enterprise software developer and feel like you need something better. I’ll help to identify this critical phase and provide some options for how to take the next step in the journey.
- Initiation/Antithesis: You must choose a path and face difficulty knowing which path to choose. This is a critical time and it can be easy to mistakenly not choose Clojure. This can cause years of wandering on the path to the dark side before seeing the light. I’ll discuss considerations and ideas that will help you to make the right choice the first time.
- Return/Synthesis: You’ve chosen Clojure and now need to integrate it into your life. I will cover some of the major challenges new/intermediate Clojurians face and give some practical advice on how to get past them.
The ideal audience for this talk is anyone that is laboring in enterprise software and wants to begin the quest for something better. For those already on the quest, this talk should help you defeat some of the challenges you face. For those who are already happily wielding Clojure, this talk should help you to get others around you to begin their own Clojure quest.
Notes
Technical Requirements
- Internet connection
- HDMI out projector
Qualifications
- I’ve been down this road since I first wanted something better in the early 2000s, saw Clojure in 2009, did Scala for 6 years, then happily adopted Clojure since around 2004.
- I’ve grown Clojure at 2 disparate companies across multiple teams and started an internal “Clojure Club” at my current company. The ability to grow Clojure from nothing is something that is hard to do, but I’ve done it repeatedly. This talk leverages and communicates lessons learned in doing that.
- I’m an experienced mentor and speaker that has given many presentations, both public and privately (at work, for example) on a variety of Clojure and other technical topics. I’m especially good at presenting material in an interesting way to audience members that are struggling with or learning new concepts. Examples: