Along Came Betty

I sat down to go over my Clojure/West notes and write some thoughts. An hour later, I had several long paragraphs and had only covered two talks. Clearly this process wasn’t going to scale. So I pondered a bit on how to express the awesomeness of Clojure/West without writing “War and Peace”. Based on a couple tweets I saw, I settled on a “Best of” approach.

Doing it this way is deeply shallow (?!) and silly. Hopefully, it’s also more fun than paragraphs of my incoherent ramblings on Datomic.

So, in rough chronological order, my “Best of Clojure/West 2012″:

• Best conference organizer: @puredanger aka Alex Miller
• Best design advice: “Choose immutability and see where it takes you.” – @richhickey
• Most difficult word to type: datamic, er, datomic.
• Best hair: if you have to ask, stop reading now.
• Most overheard: “Do you get to use Clojure at work?”
• Most thoughtful reflection on Rich’s keynote: “Holy Shit!” – @craigandera
• Special award for stepping into the den of the (ns) macro and emerging, mostly, unscathed: @craigandera
• Best talk title: “Why is a monad like a writing desk?” – @carinmeier
• Best place to ask Rich about changes in Clojure 1.4: Men’s room. Sorry ladies.
• Best feedback on my talk: “I didn’t really want to go to your talk, but my boss made me. I’m glad he did.”
• Best meme: “Don’t build frameworks; build small, composable libraries.”
• Best new development paradigm: Wikipedia Driven Development – @stuartsierra
• Best testing quote: “Unless your CI server has an unlimited supply of missiles, this is going to be difficult to test” – @stuartsierra
• Best Lorite: @rpg aka Richard P Gabriel
• Most incongruous moment: Strongbad yelling “Deleted!” in the middle of Richard Gabriel’s lecture
• Best way to get rhythm in Overtone: “Probably by creating a small function” – @samaaron
• Best lifehack and use of duct tape: @tavisrudd’s voice-driven Emacs setup, “via dragon natspeak + the python ‘natlink’ bindings and several layers of duct tape”
• Best observation of own demo: “It might not seem like a big deal, but that’s really hard to do. I just wanna be sure we’re clear. That was awesome.” – @bradfordcross
• Best swarm-assisted discovery: “Go is a reduce of place-stone over a board and a seq of inputs.” – @technomancy
• Best source of swag: @ghoseb. Just ask and he’ll hook you up. Stickers, buttons, mugs, penants, dog sweaters, tea cozies, he’s got everything, and not just Clojure stuff. :)
• Best leaf-smuggling-hobbit-inspired project name: Longbottom – @chouser
• Best channeling of Woody Allen while showing a picture of Batman riding a unicorn and telling a recycled joke comparing JavaScript to Russian literature: @fogus
• Best beer-driven keynote: @stuarthalloway
• And, of coure, best of the best: DATA!

All (most) of the slides for Clojure/West can be found on github. If you get “blob is too big” for a file, you’ll have to clone the repo and view locally :(

As a three-track conference, I missed at least 2/3 of the awesomeness of Clojure/West. What were your “Best of” moments?

clojure clojure, clojurewest