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.

UPDATE: As pointed to me in this commment, sym links aren’t necessary for Waxsim anymore. Check Jonathan Penn’s fork on github.

After coming back from my holidays in China - which were awesome - I had no downtime at ThoughtWorks and started at a brand new client/project - a much needed change from what I had been working on lately.

It’s an iOS project, more specifically an iPad app and that’s pretty much all I can tell you about it. I will however tell you how my first few days in the project have been so far.

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.

I solved a few of the problems on Project Euler in the past, both in Java and Ruby, and thought it would be useful to redo them in Clojure, thus improving my skills on the language’s core functions and libraries. Today I’ll share problem 4.

Go ahead and read it but here’s the meat of it:

“Find the largest palindrome made from the product of two 3-digit numbers.”

From this statement we can tell two things: (1) we’ll need a function that can tell whether a number is a palindrome or not and (2) that the largest palindrome is given by the product of two numbers between 100 and 999, inclusive.

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.

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:

A year ago I decided to try my hand on iPhone software development and created a very simple application to experience the whole lifecycle of putting a complete project on the Apple AppStore - I wrote about it a while back.

The result was RottingNames, a heavy metal band name generator.

Since then, I haven’t developed anything else for the iPhone - mostly because my interest lies elsewhere now - but I did notice a small yet steady amount of downloads for this cool little app.

I was in São Paulo last week - the 3rd and 4th of November - for RubyConf Brazil. For those who don’t know, RubyConf Brazil is the evolution of Rails Summit Latin America, where I had the privilege to speak in 2009.

This year though, all bets were off. Fabio Akita and Locaweb put together a great event, with over 700 attendees and about 30 speakers split in two streams and two awesome days.

Last Tuesday we held ThoughtWorks' Australia first Clojure meetup here in Sydney. It was a lot of fun so I thought I'd share a few words about it.

The format was rather simple. First, we had a brief introduction to the language syntax by breaking down a couple of snippets and understanding how each bit worked. For instance, this is one of those snippets:

;;word count
(reduce #(if (%1 %2)
              (assoc %1 %2 (inc (%1 %2)))
              (assoc %1 %2 1))
{}
(clojure.string/split "Clojure 101 - this is is gonna be be great great great" #"\s"))

The cool thing here is that a simple example like this can show quite a few things about Clojure's syntax: