Clojurians Log v2

Alright, I'm going to bounce my current proposal thoughts off you and see how they sound

cool

https://github.com/clojurewest/clojurewest2016/wiki/Suggested-Topics

I've already run a couple past Alex and got some initial direction

gonna go smoke a cig but will catch up as soon as I get back

In the past year I've gone from an interested observer to working with CLJS and CLJ as my primary languages at work, and I was able to implement my first projects in both in about the same amount of time as it would have taken to do them in my previous teach stack (.NET based), and I've been able to get buy-in for both Clojure and CLJS from our management based on the quality and speed of those initial prototypes and implementations. The overall buy-in has been based on 2 different projects, a re-frame based SPA to manage document flow in a particular set of projects, and some reports using excel-templates that have enabled me to deliver more interesting and complete data than I had in the past.

I sort of feel like there are 3 different talks that want to come out of this experience - 1 on how to take my experience and use it to get buy-in using either CLJS or Clojure and with an overview of each, 1 on using re-frame to get buy-in for CLJS over other SPA alternatives, and 1 on reporting in Clojure with excel-templates as an avenue for buy-in and adoption (because I expect that reporting is often a spot where businesses don't get what they want or need, and I know I hated writing reports before Clojure).

I'm not going to welcome everyone since this channel is small now, just join in, okay?

@shaun-mahood: I see a common theme there

Yeah, it's mainly a question of focus - I've got 40 minutes including questions, and would like to get the most useful and interesting parts in and provide some real value, especially for beginners and people trying to get Clojure implemented at work.

"Real-world buy-in from the trenches"

Yeah that's along the lines of most of the titles I've come up with so far

sold - run with it like a pair of freshly-sharpened scissors

Ok, if you attended a presentation with that as a title what would you want to come out of it with?

solid, actionable tips supported by real examples

no fluff

Ok cool, gives me something to work with. I totally agree with limiting the fluff. Amazing how difficult it is to put thoughts together for something like this though - I could talk about it for hours in casual conversation but hard to get those ideas focused.

Are you working on a proposal too?

procrastinating

had an intial idea on my polygon mesh generation work but now I'm 100% focused on chat apps, so might do a proposal on Braid or Community Development or whatever gets me accepted as a speaker so I can go

the plan is to release Braid Alpha at the conf

on April 15

is that of interest to anyone?

that's the question

I think I'd be a little more interested in the polygon mesh generation stuff as far as a talk goes if you're still thinking about that

As far as Braid or the chat app goes, I'd definitely be interested in the technical parts. Not sure if it uses core.async but it looks like there's a lot of demand for that, and I'm sure there are a lot of interesting trade offs in the design and seeing how that affects the code would be interesting. I have no idea how I would even start thinking about a talk on community development, though!

and so I keep procrastinating, but the deadline looms large

@shaun-mahood: quickly list three benefits that someone will get from your talk about buy-in

@meow: Good question, just going to procrastinate a bit :simple_smile:

just list what you would want to get from someone else's talk before you figured out how to do it yourself

and who is your target audience - for example, I am not in a corporate environment so the subject has no interest to me - nothing personal

I know there are a few non-concrete things I want to get across from my experiences 1) Demonstrating prototypes with re-frame and figwheel, making live changes based on feedback and getting the reactions 2) How I've reinforced and promoted the awesomeness of Clojure to the point that one of our managers introduced it in a casual conversation to a friend of his 3) How great excel-templates is for real-world corporate reporting, with some examples 4) Encouragement to beginners to just dive in and start building real applications - I've made a ton of mistakes as I've learned, and even my beginner, non-idiomatic code is easier to reason about and more fun and effective than it would be otherwise

I really want to target it at relative beginners who need a bit of help to enable them to start getting paid to use Clojure, especially when they have to prove it's usefulness to non-technical managers. Show how great it is by quick delivery and improved results, even as a beginner.

those are great features, but they aren't benefits

3 unique characteristics of clojure that will appeal to management

5 stupid mistakes that will kill your project before it even starts

2 ways to describe technology that even the boss can understand

7 reasons why buy-in is more important than anything else you do on your project

Oooh I like the last one - X ways to promote buy in, maybe.

How to go from beginner to winner and get a raise in the process

Or how to use your next project to get Clojure buy in

@shaun-mahood: another data point from the peanut gallery- I'd vote for either of your latter two proposal ideas- using reframe for X, using excel templates for reporting- and keeping the focus on the problem you were facing, and your solution, but the one piece of specific advice I'd offer is- try to address the "compared-to-what" question. Show how what you did with these tools was better than what existed previously. That is, maybe the best way to help someone in the situation where they need to get buy-in isn't to talk about the buy-in discussion itself- that's often highly unique to the organization and the individuals involved. Instead, provide them with evidence- imagine there's another you out there, someone who is facing the need to have a conversation about exploring these tools, or build a POC in their own time or something to solve a problem like this in a better way. Ideally, they can just point to your talk which says- for this problem, compared to the previous solution of Z, solving this with clj/cljs and this toolchain was so much better, for these reasons. Between the two of them, I think there is a fair amount of live-repl/gui material out there, whereas the clj for reporting with Excel seems comparatively less visible- though I do have a vague recollection of one talk on this, may be worth trying to find it. Anyway, hope that helps. Good luck!

@jonahbenton: Thanks, that's really good feedback. The way I was able to get buy-in was by solving problems better than I could before. There is a talk introducing excel-templates, but nothing that I've seen that really highlights why Clojure is so excellent for reporting purposes.

good points @jonahbenton

There's also another re-frame presentation that's going to be proposed, and I don't really want to step on their toes.

Looking at the specific reporting example, I had thought about going through some of the options for slicing and arranging data for presentation purposes, so that there is some concrete benefits coming out - maybe seeing a new library, or seeing how to approach and report a couple different types of data using standard Clojure operations. That way at least, I could walk a path from conceptual -> practical and hopefully give someone in the audience something useful to take away for their own work, especially beginners who maybe haven't seen or worked much with Clojure yet. I can't really drift too far away from the beginner mindset because I'm still really in that transition of gaining experience.

that's good - knowing your target audience is critical