Rafal Dittwald
Solving Problems the Clojure Way
After overcoming a fear of brackets, the next challenge for would-be Clojurians is less superficial: to stop writing Java (or Javascript, or Haskell...) with Clojure's syntax, and actually start "thinking" in Clojure. It is said that Clojure is a "functional" programming language; there's also talk of "data-driven" programming. What are these things? Are they any good? Why are they good? In this talk, Rafal attempts to distill the particular blend of functional and data-driven programming that makes up "idiomatic Clojure", clarify what it looks like in practise (with real-world examples), and reflect on how Clojure's conventions came to be and how they continue to evolve.
Rafal's Lightning Talk: "Composing Applications"
In this lightning talk, Rafal will give an explanation of how they achieved something similar to "Wordpress/Drupal plugins" and inversion of control in Clojure for Braid, an open-source clojure chat app.
About Rafal
Rafal is a web developer, programming teacher and entrepreneur from Toronto. He used to work with PHP, Ruby and Javascript, but he's spent the last 7 (blissful) years working almost exclusively in Clojure and ClojureScript. He teaches web development at Lighthouse Labs, and as part of Cognitory, he works on various "learn-to-program" resources, including a book that teaches non-programmers functional and data-driven programming with Clojure. At Bloom, Rafal works on multiple ventures, including Braid, an open-source group chat application (written in Clojure).