At one point during this year's Clojure Exchange I was reflecting on the numerous problems and setbacks there had been in organising the 2016 exchange with Bruce Durling and he simply replied: "Yeah it was a 2016 type of conference". So that's all I really want to say about the behind the scenes difficulties, despite the struggles I think it was a decent conference.

Personal highlights

James Reeves's talk on asynchronous Ring was an excellent update on how Ring is being adapted to enable asynchronous handlers now and non-blocking handlers in the future. I didn't know that there isn't an equivalent of the Servlet spec for Java NIO-based web frameworks.

The Klipse talk is both short and hilarious with a nicely structured double-act to illustrate the value of being able to evaluate code dynamically on a static page.

David Humphrey's talk, Log all the things was pretty comprehensive on the subject of logging from Clojure applications. It was one of those talks where you felt "well that's been sorted then".

Both Kris's keynote and Christian's Immutable back to front talked not just about the value of Clojure but how you can apply the principles of Clojure's design all across your solution.

One of the most interesting talks was a visualisation of prisoner's dilemma strategies in the browser. It was visual, experimental and informative.

Henry Garner's data science on Clojure talk was interesting again with some nice dynamic distributions and discussions of multi-arm bandit dynamic analysis. Sometimes I feel lots of the data science stuff is too esoteric with too little tangible output. This talk felt a little more relatable in terms of making dynamic variant testing less painful.

Disappointments

Not everything sings on the day. Daan van Berkel's talk on Rubik's Cubes suffered a technical failure that meant his presentation was not dynamically evaluating and therefore became very hard to follow. We should have tried to switch talks around or take a break and try and fix it.

The AV was a general rumbling problem with a few speakers having to have a mic switch in the middle of their talks.

Hans Hubner's talk on persistence was interesting but too quick and too subtle.

We should have had the two Spec talks closer together and earlier in the day. The things that people are doing with it are non-trivial and it is still a relatively new thing.

clojure.spec

Spec is kind of interesting generally for the community. It has become very popular, very quickly and it is being used for all kinds of things.

One theme that came up in the conference was the idea that people wanted to share their spec definitions across the codebase. This seems a bad idea and a classic example of overreach, if someone said they defined all their domain classes in a single Java jar and shared it all across the company then you'd probably thing that is a bad idea. It's not better here because it is Clojure.

The use of Spec was also kind of interesting from a community point of view as the heaviest users of Clojure seemed to be doing the most with it. The bigger the team and the codebase the quicker people have been to adopt Spec and in some cases seem to switch from using Schema to Spec.

On the other hand the people using Clojure for data processing, web programming and things like Clojurescript have not really adopted Spec, probably because it simply doesn't add a lot of benefit for them.

So for the first time in a while we have something that requires some introduction for those new and unfamiliar with it but is being used in really esoteric ways by those making the most use of it. There is a quite a big gap between the two parts of the community.

The corridor track

Out of the UK conferences I went to Clojure Exchange felt like it had the best social pooling of knowledge outside of Scale Summit. Maybe it was because I knew more people here but the talks also had all kinds of interesting little tips. For example during Christian's talk he mentioned that S3 and Cloudfront make for one of the most reliable web API deployment platforms you can choose to use. I ended up making a huge list of links of reminders and things to follow up on. I've also included links to lots of the Github repos that were referenced during the talks.

Next year

And so with a certain inevitability we are looking to the next Clojure Exchange. We're going to have a slightly bigger program committee which should make things easier.

The other thing that we didn't really do that well this year was to try and have some talks transfer from the community talk tracks to the event. In 2017 we'll hopefully be more organised around the community and also have a series of talks that are tied in to the conference itself. If you're interested in being involved in either the organising or the talks you can get involved via London Clojurians.

See you there!