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2020-11-18
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Chris Emerson15:11:02

Hey people, I just wanted to say thanks for creating this awesome podcast. It has helped me to learn quite a lot and I'm now sharing some of the episodes with colleagues at work.

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nate16:11:14

Awesome! that's great to hear

nate16:11:24

I'm so glad it's helping you out

nate16:11:53

Out of curiosity, which episodes are you sharing?

Chris Emerson16:11:10

The reducers and transducer ones at the moment. I started my Clojure journey a year ago and always struggled a bit with reducers and transducers. There are two new dev's at my company who joined recently so I've been trying to help them along with some of the concepts that you might not learn at first. We're running a weekly lunchtime Clojure club so I'll be sharing relevant episodes as we tackle different topics. I'm also trying to get them to pay a bit more attention to the underlying abstractions and to understand how stuff works as there's a lot of hidden magic.

nate16:11:58

awesome, that sounds great

nate16:11:59

does your company use Clojure or is it something that might be in the future?

Chris Emerson16:11:27

yeah, I work for a UK startup called MyPulse who work in the healthcare sector. We're also hiring at the moment if you know any London dev's

Chris Emerson16:11:04

We're doing lots of new microservices with clojure, with react native for our apps

nate16:11:19

that's great

nate16:11:58

I did a lunchtime Clojure club at my last job and they were mostly a python shop. It went pretty well, had 5-10 people most times.

nate16:11:22

I hear there's a pretty vibrant Clojure community over in London

Chris Emerson16:11:34

Cool, I'm on week 5 atm. It only takes a few hours to prepare the topics each week so it's not so bad. London's got a great Clojure community but there seems to be a lack of clojure developers

neumann18:11:18

@U019LJB4KC5 I'm happy to hear you're finding the podcast helpful! Thanks so much for posting in here and sharing that!

Chris Emerson18:11:53

Cheers Christoph, keep up the good work!

neumann18:11:08

I find it really strange how I meet a lot of developers that love Clojure, but don't get to use it at work, and then at the same time, I hear about Clojure shops that have a hard time finding developers!

neumann18:11:40

It makes me think we need a better job board somewhere. 😄

neumann18:11:20

Or maybe there just aren't enough in general. We're too spread out or something like that.

neumann18:11:54

@U019LJB4KC5 I am curious, what's your Clojure setup? Cursive? Emacs? VS Code?

Chris Emerson18:11:37

Yeah it's a weird disconnect. I guess I'm just lucky enough to work close enough to london where there are clojure startups. There's not much Clojure outside of london relatively as far as I know

neumann18:11:30

Oh cool. I haven't used Cursive myself yet, but I really like what I've seen of it. Did you try any other setup before settling on Cursive?

Chris Emerson18:11:30

I quite like all of the bells and whistles you get with the Jetbrains IDE and I've never quite found the time to properly learn the various commands and configurations needed to be productive in emacs. I tried spacemacs but the learning curve was a bit too much in a high-pressured work environment. Atom / visual studio were passable IDE's because there are quite a few plugins to configure things how you want

neumann18:11:09

Yeah. I use VIM. Like Emacs, VIM is quite the learning curve. I went through that curve a long time before using Clojure, so it didn't get in the way for me, but it makes it hard for me to recommend either to someone who is getting started.

Chris Emerson18:11:39

Although I'm not a clojure expert so take my opinions lightly. I spent years working with JavaScript / C# and have less than a year's total experience with Clojure. I'm more used to visual studio style IDE's and learning the language and functional programming was demanding enough without trying to remember all of the different key combinations. Although my colleagues run rings around me in terms of speed so I really do need to put some more effort in.

neumann18:11:44

I hear that VS Code + Calva is getting pretty good. It's on my list of things to try out.

neumann18:11:03

But it sounds like Cursive has been pretty fantastic for a while now.

Chris Emerson18:11:37

yup, i'd definitely recommend it