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#clojuredesign-podcast
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2019-08-16
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Stefan07:08:12

Hi @nate and @neumann! I just wanted to give you a bit of feedback about the podcast. I’ve been learning Clojure for the past half year now, and it’s been great. I’m listening to every Clojure-related podcast I can find, and recently I added yours as well. I’m working my way through it from the start. Yesterday evening I hosted a Clojure coding dojo, intended mostly for people without any Clojure or even FP experience. When we planned this coding dojo, I happened to be listening to the first few Tic Tac Toe episodes, and I decided to use that as inspiration. It was great! I converted your solution into a script that I worked my way through in a classroom-style setting, showing things and giving small exercises. (See: https://github.com/svdo/coding-dojo-clojure) Everybody loved it! Especially the way how you built it up to having a single reduce with something that lazily reads a collection from stdin was very insightful and an awesome way of showing the power of FP. So here you go: THANK YOU!!! Thank you for the inspiration you gave me and for helping me host a very successful coding dojo!

👍 4
🎉 8
nate16:08:58

Wow, this is awesome!

nate16:08:46

How many people attended? Was it hard to get them to the point they were executing the exercise code?

nate16:08:59

and thanks for sharing the code you used

Stefan17:08:25

There were about 45 participants. I used Nightcode so we could get started very quickly. I opened the evening by having everybody type a little bit in Nightcode to experience the parinfer smart mode: don’t worry about parens, focus on indentation. And then we started. So I had everybody follow along while I worked on the projector, and gave them lots of little exercises (see github repo, it’s in the comments in game.clj). I think we used some 2.5 – 3 hours to work through the whole thing. But ending in the grand finale of that reduce with lazy sequence of things from stdin really brought the FP message home.

Stefan17:08:18

(a few of the participants, less than 10, chose to work on their own instead of doing the more “guided track”)

nate18:08:54

wow, that's a great turnout for a workshop

nate18:08:24

does Nightcode have a built-in clojure environment or was that running externally in lein or something?

Stefan18:08:02

It comes bundled with everything it needs: Clojure, Leiningen, boot, all in one jar. Just double click and go!

Stefan18:08:25

If you’re into doing Clojure with people who are new to it, Nightcode is hard to beat. Have a look at it if you’re interested at https://github.com/oakes/Nightcode

nate21:08:28

Great to know. Thanks for the info. We're always on the lookout for ways to make getting into clojure easier.

Stefan11:08:49

Yes and we appreciate that! 🙂