So long 2013: Year highlights
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.
A major highlight is the fact that we brought Ambrose Bonnaire-Sergeant - creator of core.typed - to Sydney to give a talk on his creation. You can read a summary of the talk on our mailing list.
On a more personal note I’ve been basically living in Melbourne for the past ~6 months working on a full-time Clojure project. I have learned a lot and can’t wait to share a whole lot with the group once I’m back in Sydney.
Speaking
I was fortunate enough to speak at a couple of really cool events this year as well as a few user group talks. Here they are:
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Functional Reactive Programming in Clojurescript - LambdaJam, May 2013 - Brisbane, Australia
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Clojure macros workshop - LambdaJam, May 2013 - Brisbane, Australia / CUFP, October 2013 - Boston, USA
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Intro to core.async - #cljsyd - Sydney, Australia & #cljmelb - Melbourne, Australia
I have also attended Clojure/West in Portland back in March. Great conference, great content and amazing people. I put together some slides with my notes on SlideShare.
Books
2013 was a great year for Clojure as we saw quite a few new books be released during the year. I’ll briefly mention a couple:
Clojure Cookbook
As the authors describe it: “Clojure Cookbook marks Clojure’s entry in O’Reilly’s prestigious Cookbook Series. The book will contain hundreds of real-world problems and solutions, ranging from basic utilities to rich web services to heavy data processing."
I have contributed three recipes to this book so I’m quite happy to see them make it in. You can buy the early digital edition from O’Reilly’s website.
The book is the main effort of authors Luke Vanderhart and Ryan Neufeld with contributions from the Clojure community around the globe. They’ve put together quite the selection.
Clojure Recipes
Shameless plug of one of #cljsyd’s regulars, Julian Gamble, who’s been working on this for a while. The book should be released at the end of January 2014 and I’m looking forward to it.
Clojure High Performance Programming
I’ve only just started reading it but I already like what I see enough to mention it here.
Content
Here’s the Top 3 posts from this blog in 2013:
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Clojure and ‘Why Calculating Is Better Than Scheming’ - A fresh look at this popular paper by Philip Wadler from a Clojure perspective.
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Clojure, core.async and the Lisp Advantage - This year saw much excitement around Clojure’s core.async library and this post gives a brief introduction as to what it’s all about.
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Purely Functional Data Structures in Clojure: Red-Black Trees - This post is from a series - though I only have two posts at the moment - about persistent data structures in Clojure.
Non-tech news
For those who know me my passion for sports - such as martial arts, rock climbing and strength training - is no secret and in 2013 I became a certified personal trainer in Australia. I did this mostly for personal development and to better my own training. The certification is already paying off. It was a great course.
Happy new year! Here’s to an even better one ahead of us!