YOW Sydney – Training Day – Real World Clojure with Aaron Bedra

Imagine getting to sit in a room with Aaron Bedra for a day and ask him all your Clojure questions. Welcome to Real World Clojure at YOW 2012.
Aaron worked at Think Relevance from the time it was in Stu Halloway’s attic – almost to the mind bending powerhouse it is today. Now we works as Head of Application Security at Groupon – which he attests is awesome.

If you’ve been following the growth of Clojure for more than a year – the actual format of the day might have seemed unremarkable – a couple of guys in a hotel conference room walking through Clojure literals, functions, Clojure Interop, Macros, concurrency and applying various functional programming paradigms.

But imagine hearing about Clojure’s BigInt from the guy that did performance optimisation on it. Imagine sitting there and hearing about what it was like in the Relevance office in the four weeks before ClojureScript was launched. Imagine hearing about discussions with Rich Hickey backstage just before he gave his Simple Made Easy talk [the anti TDD one] at Strange Loop.

Imagine walking through Clojure’s recursion whilst talking about the various times that Sun has tried to implement tail recursion on the JVM and hearing the internal struggles there.

After lunch we got into some code Katas – and after half an hour the proudest in the room felt like their asses had been kicked from Sydney to Melbourne. Still so much Clojure elegance to learn. So many ways to take a relatively simple algorithm and make it cleaner and more elegant.

As the sun grew low in the sky, we worked through some Koans, did some Java interop and heard about some incredibly wizardry that happens at Groupon.

What an enormous privilege. Thanks to Dave Thomas for making YOW 2012 happen. Thanks for Aaron for coming to Australia. Thanks to my company for paying for me to go. Thanks to Daniel for encouraging me to write this post.