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Aakanksha Jain
Aakanksha Jain

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My experience attending IN/Clojure 2020

#clojure #conference

Whatever you background, Clojure is almost guaranteed to affect the way you think about programming." - Eli Bendersky

I obviously googled above quote, but this is exactly what Srihari from Nilenso told us on interaction dinner before conference.

But let me start from the start.

How/Why did I get to IN/Clojure and what is it?

IN/Clojure is India's annual Clojure and ClojureScript conference , and Asia's first. It is volunteer-run and not-for-profit.

About Clojure

I got to know from a tweet of @wmn_community about the conference, and that Nilenso is sponsoring 10 folks from underrepresented groups in tech to attend (they ended up sponsoring 16).

I read a bit about conference, and decided to apply.
Going in, I still did not have much idea of the language itself, but I was excited to explore.

Events

Workshop 'Introduction to Clojure'

This workshop was meant for people who were new to Clojure, LISPs or functional programming but not absolute beginners at programming.

Hosted by Sandilya and Nivedita from Nilenso, this workshop contained a series of exercises, examples to learn Clojure.
This was by far the best tech workshop I've attended.

  • Well designed material.
  • Exercises to do. Learning by doing!
  • Teaching assistants apart from hosts to make sure things are working for everyone and they're catching up. This is something I'd recommend every workshop host to do.
  • Amazing delivery by hosts Nivedita and Sandilya.

I really enjoyed the workshop and after getting used to slurp and barf, I was able follow it well for most parts.

Conference Day

Talks

Since I was new to Clojure, I certainly didn't understand above beginner level technical talks, but talks were so selected, that there was something for everyone. (Otherwise single track conferences carry a huge risk of people getting bored!)

Talks I enjoyed the most personally were (almost all were good, but cannot judge deeply technically talks here),

  • "Growing a Clojure Company from small to mid-sized (and hopefully beyond): tips, tricks, habits, practices" by Vedang Manerikar from HelpShift It was interesting to learn about how to they expanded team in seemingly unpopular language in India and how they evolved their mentorship process over time.
  • "Clojure for Java (OOPS) programmers" was yet another interesting talk by Rashmi Mittal and Madhuparna Ghosh from Quintype which shred light on contrasts between OOP and Functional Programming.
  • "Clojure is difficult, but worth it" by Sezal Jain from Nilenso was yet another talk we loved. Honestly, we got so familiar with her in a day, that we were rooting for her and already excited to hear her. She talked about her learning journey of Clojure from other languages, differences, difficulties etc. She encouraged Clojure developers to create more content, answer more questions on Stack Overflow and Open Source more Clojure projects. In the end, Clojure did open up a very new way of thinking, learning more deeply about nuances computer programming which often get missed while learning languages like Python.

PS: My friend Akanksha Bhasin used her talk title quite much for her instagram/twitter posts on conference day.

Interaction @ Conference
  • Interacting with people seemed easier here, and apart from conference being more intimate with lesser crowed compared to other popular conferences in India, accommodating and welcoming behaviour of folks at Nilenso, and our familiarity with them certainly did good for our confidence to go and talk to other people. (including nudges from Nivedita from Nilenso, like a friendly mentor to go and talk to people outside of Nilenso too).
  • Bingo challenge from HelpShift is to credit too. (You basically had to cross one row or column by finding one person satisfying criteria without repeating names. For example, find someone who is attending a Clojure conference for first time.) + we didn't realise earlier that we had to cross just one row/column, for a good amount of time, we were aiming for whole 25 cells to be crossed. (Lol!)
  • And again, less crowd, more approachable people, certainly helped!

Interaction dinner with folks @Nilenso and other scholars

On the day of our arrival, the day before workshop, we all went for dinner and got to interact with other scholars and people from Nilenso.
This is when we got to interact with and got comfortable with people here and learnt about other scholars. You cannot underestimate the wisdom imparted on a dinner table!
Joking aside, this is the day that helped us start off with great spirits for the workshop and conference ahead.

Board Game Night

This was another fun night hosted by Nilenso before conference day for everyone in conference. Boards Games, Pizza and cold drinks!
Although I did spend initial couple minutes drawing sketch of my new friend before Prabhanshu and Murtaza from Nilenso sensed that we were unable to read Japanese instructions from Board Game manuals and taught us one game.

Conclusion

All in All, it was an amazing experience, a very new outlook on programming, diverse and welcoming community, quality conference and workshop and fun time.
I am very thankful to entire Nilenso team for giving me this opportunity and going out of their way to make us all feel welcomed!

(Oh, and also thanks for helping me buy (and suggest) the book "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs". )

Notes
  • Find all talks of IN/Clojure 2020 here
  • Get started with Clojure here and find roadmap to learn Clojure here

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