Last night I attended the Adobe User Group here in Sydney. That might strike some of you as a big surprise given my relationship with Adobe is pretty much limited to fiddling with Photoshop/Lightroom to get my photos looking nice.

However the reason for which I attended the meetup is that Sean Corfield - a prolific member of the Clojure community - gave a presentation on how he introduced and migrated most of his backend code at World Singles from CFML to Clojure - hence my interest.

Last night we held the first ever meetup for the Sydney Clojure User Group!

When I decided to start running the meetups I had no idea we’d end up with 37 people on the first night! What a great turn out!

As for the content, here’s what you missed:

• Running Clojure apps on Heroku - Lincoln Stoll (@lstoll)

Linc works for Heroku but ended up not spending a whole lot of time talking about that - instead he showed us how to build a simple web application using Compojure, a small Clojure web framework.

As I promised in my previous post, here are the highlights of what Ola Bini had to say about Clojure/conj.

Clojure/conj is the largest gathering of clojure programmers, hackers and enthusiasts, with a single track of talks spanning three days. Ola selected his favorite talks and summarised each one of them.

The actual slides for each one of the talks can be found on github.

You can find Ola’s slides here.

Fun Data Structures

This is certainly a very interesting topic. The highlight here is the approach Clojure takes to handling immutable data structures efficiently: persistent data structures through structural sharing - maybe a good short talk for the next meetup?

Update: We now have a [Meetup.com page][9]. Head over there to learn about our next meetups as well as to RSVP to them. We’ll discontinue usage of the wiki for registering attendees, in favor of the new site. Everything else on this post however still holds.

If you’ve been following my blog, you’ll have noticed I started running internal Clojure meetups/hack nights at ThoughtWorks here in Sydney a while ago. While being closed, we’ve already had one international speaker - [Ola Bini][7] - come and share his experience as an attendee at [Clojure/conj][8]. I promise I’ll blog about it soon.