A year and four months ago I joined Atlassian to pursue a very exciting opportunity: to deliver realtime collaborative editing to Confluence. I have talked about it last year at EuroClojure and this year at QCon Brazil. Even Cognitect wrote a few words about it.

In a nutshell this involved writing Clojure code all day to build an awesome service we call Synchrony. Synchrony is capable of realtime data synchronisation - not just collaborative editing - and as such its applications are many! This has been proven again and again internally during the Atlassian ShipIt hackatons, and externally via Enso.me, which is powered by Synchrony.

In the beginning

Nearly 4 years ago I founded the Sydney Clojure User Group. I had been playing with Clojure for a little while and started a small study group to learn more. Initially this group was private and held at the ThoughtWorks office.

After a couple of meetups and conversations I decided to open up the group to the public and then realised we weren’t the only ones interested in Clojure and, even more important, interested in meeting like-minded people, share experiences and help each other.

I should have published this post still in 2015 but as I was on holidays traveling around Australia I didn’t really have the time to do it. Better late than never, right? (also Linode - the provider hosting this site - has been under a severe DDoS attack so the site just came back up today)

2015 has been a unusually quiet year in this blog. Thankfully that is because I have been extremely busy in many other areas. I’d like to take the opportunity and look back at 2015’s highlights.

Another year is about to end and as it is tradition in this blog it’s time to look at the year’s highlights!

Functional Programming

I have been advocating Functional Programming and Clojure for a while now and 2014 has been good to me. It was the first year where I was paid to work almost entirely in functional languages. Most of it was in Scala and a little less in Clojure.

Thanks, ThoughtWorks

After 4 years and 8 months I have made the hard decision to change jobs: Friday, 19th of December, was my last day at ThoughtWorks.

In this time I have made many friends and have grown a lot as a professional. Consulting presents so many new challenges that often times the technical problems you are trying to solve are the easiest part of the whole project. I am thankful for that.

This past weekend - 19-20th of December - a group of highly motivated individuals gave up their Friday night and their entire Saturday simply to learn how to code in Clojure!

It was the first ever ClojureBridge edition in Sydney and if you haven’t heard of it before, its goal is to increase diversity in the Clojure community. It does so by offering free workshops targeted at beginners.

You should totally read Julian Gamble’s post about the event for details. He’s was one of the volunteers on the day and has done a great job of describing his experiences.

I finally got some free time so sit down and write this post. I was travelling with my girlfriend around the state of Victoria, Australia - mostly around the Great Ocean Road. I had an amazing time and it’s a trip I highly recommend anyone do.

As for this year’s highlights, let’s get started:

Clojure

clj-syd - the Sydney Clojure User Group - continues going strong and this is in great part thanks to the amazing community behind it. You can have a look at our wiki page for 2013 to see what we’ve been up to.

Keeping the tradition of end-of-year blog posts, here are my year highlights for 2012:

Clojure

I started clj-syd - the Sydney Clojure User Group - back in January and it has seen a major uptake. We consistently get an average of 25 people each month and there’s no shortage of talks and topics to discuss. It’s a great crowd and I’m proud to have started it and of being part of it.

It’s that time of the year to look back at what you’ve done and either be happy about it or… well not. :)

To me anyway 2011 was a great year but I won’t bore you with the details so I’ll just jump straight into a couple of highlights!

The biggest one of course was the project we developed to help the Queensland flood victims back in January - which brings me to the next topic: