EuroClojure - The Second Day

After an amazing first day, the second day of EuroClojure 2013 was different, but also really great.

Narcissistic Design

The funny keynote by Stuart Halloway, was about him, as the first slide mentioned. What we learned from him were ten simple rules, how we can make us indispensable for our employers. His advices included many useful things:

OH: it’s obviously bad practice because it’s written in PHP #euroclojure

— Moritz Grauel (@mo_gr) October 15, 2013

"Static Typing is an academical experiment only suitable for small projects." @stuarthalloway #euroclojure

— Tobias Pfeiffer (@PragTob) October 15, 2013

Apply #narcissisticdesign and be clean code certified at the same time works well ✔ #euroclojure

— Jan Ehrhardt (@derjan) October 15, 2013

#euroclojure clean code pro tip pic.twitter.com/v0acHYjQV1

— Thomas Moerman (@thomasjmoerman) October 15, 2013

On eventual consistency #euroclojure pic.twitter.com/XpqEg4xBCm

— Iván Perdomo (@katratxo) October 15, 2013

You can also read some further notes on it taken by Tero Parviainen.

Migrating an existing code base to Clojure

The next two talks came from companies, that migrated to Clojure and shared their experiences.

First Martin Trojer from Xively told about the Internet of Things and their cloud service. They started with Ruby on Rails, but failed. So they tried Node.js and Go and ended up with Clojure.

Ruby accidents at #euroclojure pic.twitter.com/ul3PiAZsjZ

— Pavel (@1360g) October 15, 2013

Unfortunately the talk resulted in a discussion on Twitter about Ruby bashing.

"We've got a lot of vim developers... You don't wanna force emacs on those guys" #euroclojure

— Hendrik Volkmer (@hvolkmer) October 15, 2013

The other migration talk came from Daily Mail. They are serving a homepage, that is eight and a half meters long, when printed on paper. They migrated their complete application from Oracle and Java to a new Clojure code base. The best is, they did it in just six month!

The mail online legacy code #euroclojure pic.twitter.com/fS21CpNj6x

— Jan Ehrhardt (@derjan) October 15, 2013

The new mail online code base #euroclojure pic.twitter.com/gIw1hQK0MU

— Jan Ehrhardt (@derjan) October 15, 2013

The lightning talks

After lunch three lightning talks were given. The first one about Literate Programming with Emacs and OrgMode. Then there was this guy talking about Lithium, which is a Lisp, that is compiled to native x86 code. Pretty amazing. The last lighting talk was a solid comparision of Clojure template engines without any winner.

Turn the music on again

After the Creative Machines talk yesterday, we got music again on the stage. Sam Aaron started his talk with live coding music right in his Emacs! Joseph Wilk recorded it and shared it:

Live performance by @samaaron & @meta_ex at #EuroClojure https://t.co/83aXEmtIFf Beautiful & inspiring, create your own @Overtone band

— Joseph Wilk (@josephwilk) October 15, 2013

Sam will give a live performance at the c-base in Berlin on friday evening. You can watch a video of what he does on YouTube:

Enterprise integration patterns

The last two talks were about enterprise integration, a topic I would not expect on a Clojure conference. But the talks were less borring, than expected. The speakers showed their expiriences about tools like Storm and Lamina for integration scenarios, which was really interesting.

Conclusion

EuroClojure 2013 was a extemely valuable event with lots of inspiring talks and fun. I am definitely looking forward to next year’s EuroClojure.