clojuTRE 2013

We attended clojuTRE 2013 this week and it was brilliant, thanks to Metosin and Nitor for organizing.

The presentations:

• ZenRobotics, who can probably claim to have deployed Clojure into production for the longest here in Finland, had Jouni Seppänen and Joel Kaasinen talk about the challenges with resource handling and how to integrate with OpenCV.
• Tero Parviainen gave a talk on Pedestal, an über hipster web development framework by Relevance. Tero's opinion was that it is still evolving and probably not something you would use for customer projects just yet.
• International Clojure superstars Sam Aaron, Christophe Grand, Edmund Jackson and Meikel Brandmeyer from Lambda Next gave a presentation on core.async. The integration of a technical presentation with a comedy act was hilarious. For this topic it worked perfectly, even though there were a few deadlocks.
• Last but not least was a weapons demonstration by Jari Länsiö from Metosin. This super enthusiastic performance showed how to control an (almost) military grade drone with Clojure.

All in all the presentations were excellent and easily matched those at more established conferences.

After-party

After the official program most of us headed to the after-party. It was very interesting to share thoughts with other Finnish Clojurians on how to convince customers that Clojure, and its ecosystem, is production ready.

Final thoughts

We deployed our first Clojure project over a year ago and we have luckily been successful in proving our customers that Clojure is a viable option so that the majority of our new projects are Clojure-based. We found that some of the best arguments for Clojure are development speed, clear paradigm and consistent style. The last two lessen vendor lock-in which is always a worry for the customer.