london clojure dojo

(Last night I went to the London clojure dojo.)

(. javax.swing.JOptionPane (showMessageDialog nil 

  (reduce str ["Hello" "London" "Clojure" "Dojo"])))

This dojo was hosted by @otfrom and @rrees at the ThoughtWorks offices (many thanks to them). They put on a nice spread of quiche and sandwiches. Here's some of the quiche... which was nicer than it looks in this photo.) (

-- quiche picture credit to @otfrom (used without permission ;))

There was a github repo setup https://github.com/ldnclj/footpad before the session with the code from previous weeks.

After grazing, and drinking of softdrinks - the night started with a mini talk on cake (the tasty build tool + enhanced repl(interpreter) + kitchen sink for clojure) by the co-organiser of the dojo (Robert Rees from ThoughtWorks).

A programmer from Deutsche bank was there recruiting clojure programmers, and getting involved in the dojo too. It kind of reminded me of python in the early days... where you could count the number of python jobs around on one hand (and two feet worth of toes). People were talking about how they got a chance to use clojure at their work for a small project, or how they were thinking of sneaking a little bit of clojure into their projects.

Anyone who's been to the London python dojo would be familiar with the format (@otfrom is involved in that one too).

We were split into teams of five, and then huddled around the keyboard... then began to scratch our heads. I'd only started learning clojure earlier that day (well I think I've read about it before, but not in depth) (so there was a lot to learn. Luckily a few of the people in my group had more experience with clojure.

During these sessions, it's great to see how other people work in their environments. It's also interesting to see how people think in clojure. Everyone in our group got a chance to type at the keyboard, and we almost got our task done. In our group we used some tests, map+reduce and doall functions as well as list, array and map data structures. We even used a few cake commands (autotest and killall).

At the end of an hour or so of coding each group did a mini presentation and demo of what they made. Each group got a fair way towards getting the task done, and we got to see how they coded things. It's fun seeing what others got up to, the approach they took and the challenges they faced.

... at the end we left through the dungeon below the building. Those who survived had a few drinks at the pub afterwards. )