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#clojure-uk
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2018-12-05
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jasonbell07:12:15

Can someone tell me what day of the week it is……

jasonbell07:12:14

@lady3janepl <<- Jason’s (auto-updating AI)>> Currently thinking through a blog post about how to do that and explain it out properly, Monday was quite a deep dive covering all bases.

3Jane07:12:18

I can tell you what time it is: too damn early :D

jasonbell07:12:48

That I agree with, but I’m rubbish at sleeping so I’m up 🙂

otfrom08:12:00

@sleepyfox I know there are quite a few people in this channel who work and/or hire remotely. You, me, @jasonbell @mccraigmccraig @maleghast (?) @agile_geek @acron and I'm sure I've forgotten loads of others

otfrom08:12:17

I need to watch the video of your talk (I missed too many as always)

sleepyfox08:12:14

There's only about 60s at the end that talks about hiring, and nothing at all about the way we work, which is here: https://gower.st/blog/2018/how-we-pair-on-code/

mccraigmccraig08:12:33

yep, working & hiring remotely here...

sleepyfox08:12:07

I had suggested a video conference

sleepyfox08:12:20

How about tomorrow lunchtime, 1pm?

3Jane08:12:33

So for those of you who work remotely, I have a question, how do you manage the social side of things?

sleepyfox08:12:38

We could perhaps record it and make it available to others?

mccraigmccraig08:12:25

@lady3janepl by bucking the trend and employing old people with kids and therefore no social life 😁

❤️ 8
😂 8
☝️ 4
maleghast08:12:26

I am a little bit of an odd case... I work predominantly on-prem in London and I have been urged to find developers who are prepared to be on-prem at least when I am, i.e. no less than I.

3Jane08:12:57

I tried going remote for a year and it was an awful experience because company decisions and conversations passed me by; this was due to me being the only fully remote person so I always wondered if it works out better for fully remote companies

maleghast08:12:25

I have made the case, several times that we would be better off with distributed working and that I could be more productive by being away from the office for more of my month, but so far I am ice-skating uphill

mccraigmccraig08:12:07

(we also have an office and like people to come in for face to face time as regularly as makes sense)

maleghast08:12:22

@lady3janepl - I really believe that if a company is going to work distributed / remote then that needs to be the default, so that comms is geared to the distributed team.

3Jane08:12:39

@maleghast right, yeah, because it’s extra work to write it all down

maleghast08:12:14

Having some__ FaceTime is valuable for sure, but it’s an either or as otherwise the distributed workers can quickly become 2nd class citizens

💯 4
3Jane08:12:40

(But writing it all down is good for the company: it generates and updates docs that normally live in organisational memory only. So it’s weird to me that managers are opposed to it.)

maleghast08:12:03

I am happy to be proven wrong if anyone’s had a lot of success with doing on-prem and distrib type hybrids mind you

otfrom08:12:21

@lady3janepl we had two people really push us to have our conversations in a remote friendly way when they first started with us remote (most of us were in London). That helped loads.

otfrom08:12:54

it did make us seem a bit weird when we were co-located in a big office. Little ripples of laughter would erupt when we were all quiet as we were reading jokes on irc or slack. 🙂

otfrom08:12:23

so our on-prem/distributed worked well, but we worked in a distributed way on prem (if you see what I mean)

jasonbell08:12:24

@maleghast It’s a game of two sides, it’s up to the remoter to partake in conversation and not become and island. On the opposite side it’s up to the company to recognise that remoters are employees/contractors too and have the same say as everyone else.

👍 4
maleghast08:12:40

Hehe. That sounds nice, to me, not weird at all, but then I used to sit in the same computer rooms as Uni friends using UNIX talk instead of words...

3Jane08:12:18

I do the same... it’s a way to avoid noise pollution in open space offices

maleghast08:12:27

@jasonbell - I would agree that everyone has to be an active part of the process, I am just aware that mixing the two styles seems harder to maintain.

jasonbell08:12:44

Yeah I agree

mccraigmccraig09:12:28

that's a challenge for us @maleghast - only the dev team is remote - sales, customer success, marketing are all in the office - we're looking at making an on-prem dev hire to bridge the gap and enable better inter team comms

maleghast09:12:30

My one exception that proved the rule was the Ops guy I had in my first job in Manila. He was in Suffolk and I was in The Philippines, but it felt as though he was sitting with me / ya a lot of the time. In fact he and I still check in on one another now, over two years later

3Jane09:12:15

What I meant is not that conversations don’t happen online, but rather that important conversations tend to happen face to face. “What are we gonna work on this quarter?” Or “We need this X thing and it’s a team project: let’s have a colocated group do it.”

maleghast09:12:27

@mccraigmccraig - Yeah, I can see that being the “why” my CEO is resistant to a distributed engineering / dev team

otfrom09:12:33

@sleepyfox 1PM tomorrow works for me. I've put it in my calendar

otfrom09:12:25

@lady3janepl moving those important conversations online was one of the things we had to do (as otherwise important people in the process were being left out)

otfrom09:12:45

there is a lot of responsibility that needs to be borne by the co-located team to make sure the right people are involved

otfrom09:12:03

tho I sometimes think we think of colocated as being in the same open office or team room. If everyone was in their own offices then you'd need to gather everyone for a chat anyway. You couldn't just stand up and say "hey team, let's do this"

jasonbell09:12:33

Oh man, politely trolled by Skillsmatter 🙂 “Full-time Clojure expert & part-time #clojurex model”

otfrom09:12:02

did you give them ammunition again?

otfrom09:12:20

petards and hoisting there I think

jasonbell09:12:54

Planting and payoff. Standard script tactics 🙂

3Jane09:12:42

And now I present you, the very model of a modern Clojure engineer, everyone welcome Jaaaaaaaase!

jasonbell09:12:47

@lady3janepl “….needs a walking stick, is overweight…..“ 🙂

3Jane09:12:00

I notice you’re also an expert on Kaftan Connect. That’s definitely into modelling industry ;P

otfrom09:12:23

I wish I could wear a kaftan as well as Kyle

otfrom09:12:48

(but his is from the ex-CTO of rent the runway, so maybe I just need to go more upmarket in my purchases)

jasonbell09:12:43

Kilts and Bromptons: so many jokes, so little time.

3Jane09:12:29

Uncomfortable.

3Jane09:12:39

That’s all I’m going to say.

otfrom09:12:58

looks good to me

alexlynham09:12:38

I'm more concerned about seat comfort

mccraigmccraig10:12:41

as a mountain biker, and therefore deeply opposed to lycra, i'm not sure where i stand on kilts. they are suitably "baggy", but they also undeniably leave your arse hanging out and i'm guessing it's not the done thing to wear chamois-shorts underneath

alexlynham11:12:32

well I guess people are unlikely to look up your kilt and see the shorts unless you go over a jump or something?

alexlynham11:12:56

I have to say that kilt<->🚲 mechanics are not something I had considered before today

alexlynham11:12:09

I'd be mostly worried about the kilt jamming the chain and throwing me off

Conor09:12:21

You London folks have it fairly easy, there are few options here for Clojure work so it's mostly either remote or do something else

Conor09:12:27

Which is why I'm toiling in the Java mines

otfrom09:12:08

Manchester seems to have a fair bit of clojure. Some in Bristol. A bit in Glasgow.

Conor09:12:27

Not IME? Apart from Swirrl and the BBC

otfrom09:12:07

fair enough

agile_geek09:12:23

Nowt in the NE of England or Yorkshire

alexlynham09:12:41

Manchester clojure is more of an organised resistance to java than a 'scene'

alexlynham09:12:51

but y'know, it's my longer-term goal to bring FP to the wilderness

alexlynham09:12:00

judge dredd style

😀 12
practicalli-johnny13:12:55

Oh, no Judge Dred emoji, what on ommission.. How do we add one..?

alexlynham13:12:45

I don't know, you need to be an admin of the slack so maybe Sean could help..?

Conor09:12:12

Shine on, you crazy diamond

metal 4
mccraigmccraig10:12:51

wow, you don't go back to manchester for a few months and it turns in to megacity-?... what number ? is boing a thing ?

rhinocratic10:12:11

Also toiling in the Java mines here. Thankfully remote for much of the time these days, so not so many 5:30 starts in order to get into Manchester. Most of the team are remote for most of the time, so things are geared toward that being the norm. The daily Slack calls are OK, but I think I'd go a bit stir-crazy without some element of face-to-face. I concur with @conor.p.farrell's sentiments regarding the state of Clojure in this neck of the woods.

alexlynham10:12:15

well, y'know, not being facetious about it, I've also found that it's actually developer uptake that's the barrier

alexlynham10:12:04

I managed to get to the 'show me I can hire, and, well, probably still no, but show me I can hire' stage, and then hit the wall

alexlynham10:12:37

though maybe that's because I'm a bad teacher, idk

alexlynham11:12:31

I did get a couple of people into emacs though

alexlynham11:12:57

so... :man-shrugging:

mccraigmccraig11:12:13

it's hard enough to get other developers to drink the clojure kool-aid... most managers and higher won't have much appreciation of the advantages of a functional homoiconic lang

💯 8
alexlynham11:12:31

tbf, one of my direct reports intuitively got the homoiconic thing right away, but literally went "one day I will use this power, today, I need to work on a python project"

alexlynham11:12:52

so I get that it's a practical choice for a lot of folks

alexlynham11:12:28

if it's hard to get a job in, it might not be worth learning... but I guess I've never really understood that attitude. Stuff is worth learning for the sake of it

dotemacs11:12:02

So it seems that there is lots of interest in having this discussion about remote working, best practices/tips as mentioned by @otfrom and @sleepyfox at ClojureX. Is this discussion at 13:00h on? And if it is, via what? Google hangouts… ?

otfrom12:12:41

@sleepyfox @dotemacs any idea where we should meet at 13:00?

dotemacs12:12:42

Good question. What does(n’t) work for you?

otfrom13:12:00

meet is good. Not sure if the vid conf on slack works here or not

otfrom13:12:17

anything that works well on linux (tho my skype is b0rken atm)

otfrom13:12:41

http://appear.in works tho has a limit to 4 unless you are paying for it

folcon13:12:55

I’m surprised they don’t do a pay as you go model.

folcon13:12:13

Hangouts was suggested earlier? Or is there an issue with that?

otfrom13:12:14

does this work for people? To join the video meeting, click this link: https://meet.google.com/ptf-mnrp-dkj

folcon14:12:56

I’m happy to fire a quick email around to everyone + @sleepyfox.

otfrom14:12:28

that works for me

sleepyfox14:12:58

I'm very sorry, I'm off ill today and had completely forgotten about the video call. Perhaps next week?

dotemacs14:12:42

Sure, I jotted down some notes from this weeks gathering: https://gist.github.com/dotemacs/c399c52320205a6c9e7207e8cfc2ef41

rhinocratic11:12:31

Generally, I've found the major barrier to be the level of investment in the current way of doing things. The cost of making a huge change (with a non-obvious payoff) is simply too great, and I can see the justification for that.

danm11:12:23

Soooo many things I'd like to improve on with our current setups, and just can't argue for time to do it over supporting client requirements. It feels like spending a week to properly clean stuff up so we're not working around old issues every time would make us able to deliver faster, but it's hard to get concrete numbers on it to throw at the people in charge

Conor11:12:35

Seize the means of production, Dan

danielneal11:12:05

the aws keys?

😂 16
mccraigmccraig12:12:24

i'd be interested to see a DAG/POSET for "strictly-better-than/strictly-worse-than" relationships amongst languages

3Jane12:12:44

https://lispmachine.wordpress.com/2013/03/17/the-programmer-hierarchy/ and then someone added the more esoteric languages at the top

3Jane12:12:24

but it’s out of date already since it doesn’t have node/modern JS anywhere on it, or Python which blew up due to ML

danm14:12:50

Do Clojure programmes count as Lisp programmes, because of the syntax, or Java programmers, because of the interop/high level/JVM? 😉

3Jane15:12:48

The first one was pre Clojure :) the second one includes it

mccraigmccraig15:12:44

it depends on whether you have joined macro club @U6SUWNB9N

danm15:12:18

I have written a few macros. I still find them really hard to follow and only use them when I have no other recourse though 😉

mccraigmccraig15:12:41

hence the first rule of macro club!

otfrom12:12:26

@mccraigmccraig I'm not sure that could ever exist, but there is one on who looks down on whom that I've seen floating around

otfrom12:12:32

but that feels like just stirring things up tbh

mccraigmccraig12:12:59

yeah, it's probably bollocks, but i do feel that clojure>java and clojure>ruby but clojure?haskell and ruby?perl

mccraigmccraig12:12:53

on another topic (:drum_with_drumsticks:) does anyone have anything good or bad to say about confluent schema registry ?

jasonbell12:12:05

<<good or bad to say about confluent schema registry>> @mccraigmccraig on the whole I like it but i’ve not really pushed it to a production type system.

mccraigmccraig12:12:40

i'm thinking about schema change in our upcoming event-sourcing implementation (which will put entity change events onto a kafka topic)

👍 4
danm14:12:09

I've not used it, as we're on 'bare' Kafka rather than Confluent Open Source, but I do wish we had used it

danm14:12:52

Having to define schemas for our input/output events might have prevented some of the bugs where we decided to mess about with event structure and broke things downstream until they also got updated

alexlynham14:12:57

if you're microservice-ing, you need that contract hype

danm15:12:01

We've managed so far without it. Only ~100 microservices though. And I certainly think it would have been easier if we'd had schemas.

alexlynham15:12:30

the whole ballgame is upfront effort vs long-term pain (with the caveat that 'no pain' has never been, and will never be an option) 🙂

alexlynham15:12:50

how are things at your end though Dan? Been a while since I saw you in meatspace

danm15:12:36

Eh, not bad. Tired. Always tired 😉 Had to skip the last LL because I was just dead after a weekend driving to Scotland and back to sort out stuff for Laura's Mum. Hoping to make the next one

danm15:12:53

Got to the final round of interviews with Confluent's London offices, but they eventually decided they didn't want me. Not as bothered as I could have been as I wasn't really looking, they reached out to me, and I don't want to move to London. But at the amount they were offering I had to at least try.

alexlynham15:12:28

was it scala type stuff?

alexlynham15:12:01

sorry to hear that dude 😞

danm15:12:32

For now I'm working with my boss to try and get bumped up here within H1 2019

danm15:12:44

Naah, they've dropped Scala pretty much

danm15:12:49

They deprecated the Scala clients a while back, and have actually removed them from Kafka 2.0.0. Kafka itself is back to being all the Java, and most of their infra tools for SRE and such are in Go, with bits of Python

jasonbell16:12:35

Going back to Java doesn’t completely surprise me. A central core of Java makes sense so the Clojure, Scala, Go, Rust, Python folk can plug in how they wish.

danm16:12:01

It was also, from talking to them, that they were using Scala because someone wanted to as "the new shiny", rather than because they were actually making use of any of the functional stuff in it. So it was largely pointless

jasonbell16:12:22

No big surprise. Well it got them so far.

alexlynham15:12:51

> Kafka itself is back to being all the Java, and most of their infra tools for SRE and such are in Go, with bits of Python Huh, that's interesting

Sam H15:12:49

RE: the remote working conversation earlier in the morning, I found this talk from Lead Dev this year had some good ideas to think about (disclosure, I’ve never worked remotely full time before 😅)

Using Agile Techniques to Build a More Inclusive Team - Kevin Goldsmith | #LeadDevLondon 2018
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Atfxtk2Q90k&amp;list=PLBzScQzZ83I_VX8zgmLqIfma_kJs3RRmu&amp;index=19&amp;t=0s

danm15:12:04

@alex.lynham First half 2019. Like stuff gets written as Q1 2019 for release within the first quarter etc

danm15:12:25

I see it all the time for computer hardware and games, but maybe it's pretty specific to that

seancorfield16:12:46

Re: remote -- my company is 100% remote so everyone is on the same footing. We have to "over communicate" a bit but it works. When only part of your team is remote, you really have to work extra hard to "remember" the remote folks because it's all too easy to have a face-to-face conversation, around a desk, at the water cooler, and simply not include them 😞

danm09:12:24

It's bad enough when we're all in-office but some people have a lot of meetings and miss out on those conversations

otfrom16:12:59

when you spend all day digging around trying to munge a data structure and then you realise that you should have used juxt aaaaaaaages ago

🎉 8
jasonbell17:12:09

At least you found it/got it/sorted it.

otfrom17:12:22

it was easy once I looked at the juxt example on clojuredocs and went 💡

dominicm17:12:35

I write a juxtamap utility in some projects to ease datafication

dominicm17:12:49

Might be a useful thing to have access to inside Datafy

rickmoynihan18:12:54

About half of us work in the office and half work remotely, with a pretty relaxed attitude to working from home. It has its pros and cons for sure but generally works quite well — but I’m not sure remote working suits everyone.

danm09:12:46

Yeah, I have a lot of distractions at home, and I find face-to-face discussion and pairing much easier and more useful than over video/screen sharing. I wouldn't actually want to work from home more than occasionally when I needed to get a delivery or similar, and by the same token I'd find it hard to work in a company where I was regularly working with remote people

rickmoynihan18:12:52

I prefer to be in the office most of the time, but work from home as and when.