Dear Clojurians,
The London Clojurians group is growing!!! We are now over 2000 members strong and counting... (https://www.meetup.com/London-Clojurians/)
We are a diverse, decentralised, open and friendly group of people. As a group, we organise a number of different activities for both: new and seasoned Clojurians.
For example, every two weeks, we have Clojure Dojos to help members to sharpen their skills, and newcomers to learn more about the language and the tooling. Two companies have been our long-term partners and helped us sponsoring the venue, food and drinks, many thanks to uSwitch and ThoughtWorks. Although this year we haven't managed to organise many Dojos due to the pandemic, their support has been very valuable over the years, and rest assured we will start organising dojos as soon as possible.
We have weekly study groups organised by John Stevenson (@practicalli) which have been really appreciated by the developers who are trying to learn more about Clojure. All the videos are uploaded to https://www.youtube.com/c/+practicalli check them out! John's relentless effort towards thecommunity hasn't passed unnoticed and many respondents really enjoyed his sessions. Well done John, and keep going!
Once a year we organise Clojure Bridge London (https://clojurebridgelondon.github.io/) an initiative to bring more diversity in our community with free workshops and learning sessions in a fun and friendly environment.
We also organise technical talks, and like many other communities during this time, we are now organising online talks and the recordings are available on our YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/c/LondonClojurians).
There are many more talks already scheduled, like:
- Mey Beisaron - Game Development - https://bit.ly/3mOCBQR
- Sean Corfield - REPL-Drive Dev - https://bit.ly/3jLC6Fa
- Martin Clausen - Data DSL - https://bit.ly/34uEgox
- Sam Ritchie - Literate Programming - https://bit.ly/3719QdH
- Alexander Oloo - Clojure + PHP + GraalVM - https://bit.ly/36An4h9
- Yehonathan Sharvit - Data Oriented Programming - https://bit.ly/3mAlQsp
...and more to come.
Finally, few London Clojurians, Renzo Borgatti (@reborg), Aleksandar Simic (@dotemacs), Igor Garcia, Pawel (@prnc), Simion Iulian Belea, David Harrigan (@dharrigan) and John Stevenson (@practicalli) have organised the second edition re:Clojure Conference (https://reclojure.org/). A free and open Clojure conference with plenty of great talks. All the videos are available online (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbZW8yCqEncYciie8_1yy7w).
This year has been challenging for everyone in many ways. We had to learn to live and work in a different way, however, our commitment to the community stayed the same.
In the last couple of months, I've run a survey throughout our community to better understand how to target the talks for 2021, many thanks to all participants. I wanted to share here some of the results.
Nearly 77% of the respondents have attended one or more online talks.
It is always hard to target precisely how technical a talk should be, most of the attendants agree that the technical level of the talks was just right, however, sometimes it might have been a bit too technical.
When asked what level of details they like to receive in a talk, there is a clear shift towards technical details. Our members like to understand how things work, and they favour practical talks as supposed to theoretical/inspirational talks.
Most of the people who attended the talks agreed that the talks were really well prepared, so a massive thanks to all the speakers who put time and effort into preparing these talks.
Most of the attendees rated the people interaction "good" during the talks and when asked which online meetup style they prefer, ~90% responded that they prefer a straight talk with questions at the end, so we will keep the same format.
When asked which topic they would like to hear about, 90% of them are interested in backend development and databases, followed by real-world projects and experience reports, core language features and new libraries. The result, quite clearly, reiterates the fact that most of the members use these talks to learn something new and something practical.
and here some of the topics requested (in order of popularity):
cider, reitit, spec, clojurescript, conjure, integrant, re-frame, reagent, compojure, datomic, distributed logging, kafka, malli, tdd, component, concurrency, core language concepts, core.async, datomic/alternatives, duct, enterprise projects, eql, etaoin, front-end alternatives, fulcro, graalvm, high-performance machine learning, deftype vs defprotocol vs defrecord etc, interop, jetty9 adapter, macros, microservices, mount, next-jdbc, parallel computing, pathom, pedestal, refactoring clojure code, re-natal mobile development, ring, schema, crux, system design, transducers.
Some of these topics have been already covered with talks in the last couple of months with Cider, Babashka and Malli our most attended talks, and some are already in the pipeline. However, if you know about any of the above topics and you wish to present it to the London Clojurians send us your proposal via https://forms.gle/6Cgym9xFnZ5Nt9hcA we will be happy to organise it for you. Send us your talk proposals even if the topic is not in the list, we want to give everyone a platform to share their ideas, stories and present their libraries.
If you would like to join the organiser's group and help planning the talks get in touch with me via Slack @bruno.bonacci, we'll be happy to have you.
I'd like to take the opportunity to wish everyone a great time during the festive season and a great start of 2021.
Regards,
Bruno Bonacci
I will leave you with some of the nice words left by our members in the survey:
It's great. Wish we could get back to doing dojos, but the online stuff is also good
Thank you for the study group on Saturdays
Beginner level, after clojure bridge weekend (which was brilliant!)
I live on the US east coast so the remote format was a great opportunity interact with other clojurists. Thank you for all your work.
I really love the study groups, thank you!
Love Clojure community. Geeky just enough. :) Keep up the good work of building Clojure community.
Many thanks for keeping the community going. I've drifted away from Clojure over the past few years but it's great to come back and hear about cool things that people are doing with possibly my favourite language. Keep up the good work!
You are doing great work for the community.
Great initiative!
Keep up a good work. Thanks for organising these talks!
well done and thank you for doing the London Meetups!
Thanks for making the meetup available online, it's a great chance to participate from foreign countries.
Thanks for doing all this!
Great work on the regular talks lately!
Keep up the good work
Keep up the great work. We support each other.
This meetups are great. Thanks so much! I am a beginner and many things are still a bit "green"
THANK YOU!
Good job. My intention is to visit as many meetups as possible.
Great work, I'm really enjoying this new batch of online talks!
Great session - very thought-provoking!
Thank you for the great talks!
Great events. Very much appreciated. Thx for the effort!
Online events are great. I can finally attend to CLojure meetups :)
Thank you so much for offerring this, and recording it. It's so hard to find mentors and teachers in the clojure community if you aren't already embedded in a company or a large meetup. This was really a helpful introduction for me.
thank you for organizing!
Keep up the good work and many thanks!
Great stuff! I appreciate the presentations.
