For the first session I was interested in trying to continue the discussion about the Clojure “sweet spot” we had had on the mailing list. But there was only a smattering of interest so we rolled it up with the discussion on how to convince people in investment banks to use Clojure.
I think Jon Pither’s approach to this is still the best which is to find a business problem and then say that you’re going to address the problem and use Clojure to solve the real problem. A pure technical argument is not really going to get buy-in from outside the developers.
A lot of organisations want to have an approved list of technologies and for institutions that have chronic and acute technical problems like banks then perhaps that is appropriate given the need for external regulation. Where these things exist I usually think it is a case of going through the bureaucratic hoops.
The approval system is not there to be opinionated but to provide oversight. Where individuals have “weaponised” the approval process to advance their view of “right” technology you need to tackle the root problem not just sneak things in as jars.
My personal view is that financial institutions have profound technology problems but that they have no incentive to address them while they continue to make a lot of money. Really their problems should be providing opportunities for new approaches but as the existing institutions have created massive barriers to entry it doesn’t happen and we’re all really just waiting for the next financial crisis to happen, maybe then…
However in the session there was a lot of discussion about whether it is appropriate for managers to determine technology choices: on the one side you want to devolve decisions to the people close to the problem, on the other programmers commonly change jobs in a shorter period that the lifespan of the software they create.
One thing I took away was that before conservative organisations adopt Clojure they will need to see widespread adoption in the companies they see as good leading indicators and the presence of a large hiring population. In these respects Scala is literally years ahead.
Our final conclusion as a group was simply that the easiest way to approve the use of Clojure was to get into management and leadership first and then do it.
For the second session I went to the discussion on React and Om. I’m looking at React currently and there were a lot of questions about what Om layers on top of the basic JS library. Anna Pawlicka provided a number of the Om answers and others chipped in with bits of React and reactive JS knowledge. I was reminded to go and look at the current state of Om and also the new tutorials. There was also some interesting talk of how to define React components, Anna used Sablono but is there still a need for JSX?
The final session of the evening was on Riemann, which in addition to be a basic introduction to what it does was a helpful reminder of the functionality that Riemann has but that I haven’t used personally. Jason Neylon mentioned that every new service they set up has a Riemann instance attached so you can just dump all events somewhere and then build dashboards dynamically as you go along (a lot better than our approach with Graphite).
Tom Crayford introduced me to the effect of clock skew on Riemann (events from the “future” relative to the Riemann server clock are dropped) and then pointed out that clock skew can actually be monitored via Riemann! Also some interesting stuff about pumping logs into Riemann and some personal experience of crazy volumes of events being successfully handled.
Just before the end of the event I dropped in to the Gorilla REPL session to see Jony Hudson demoing his amazing notebook repl that he has been using to share assignments and research with students and colleagues in his department. A really interesting application and I suspect once we get our heads round it a really interesting way of sharing problems and potential solutions as developers.
Mind slightly blown, I was personally really happy with the event and felt that I’d got a mix of advice and the kind of innovation that make the Clojure community so interesting.
