Announcing First Speakers

We work hard to make Heart of Clojure special, but we couldn't have a conference without the amazing speakers and workshop hosts who sent in their submissions. We received 70 proposals from 52 individuals. You all outdid yourself, we got lots of great proposals, and had to make some tough choices.

Today we're ready to announce our first speakers, the rest will follow in the coming week.

James Reeves - Living With Legacy Code

If the name James Reeves doesn't immediately ring a bell, maybe his alias Weavejester does. The creater of Hiccup and Integrant to name just a few of his libraries, and the maintainer and main contributor to Ring, it's hard to imagine someone with a bigger impact on the Clojure ecosystem.

He'll be sharing from his rich experience, talking about the challenges of dealing with legacy code and backward compatibility, by presenting a case study of some of the oldest code bases he still maintains.

Katja Böhnke - Open Hearts for Diversity [Interactive Session]

As a woman in tech Katja is used to being the only woman in the room. To feel different. To ask herself, "do I belong here"?

Katja has the opportunity to working on a team with people of different ages, gender, sexual orientation, religion, physical and mental abilities, and ethnic and social background. Unfortunately, many teams are less diverse and so not everyone gets to share this experience. Therefore, she wants to create an opportunity to learn about each other and to become aware of similarities and differences.

In this interactive session we share experiences and talk about challenges. The goal is to raise awareness for the topic, to hear each others stories and to support each other. The session is open for all! You are invited to open your heart for diversity and connect with each other!

Dimitris Kyriakoudis - TimeLines: Live Musical Coding

If we had known you could get a PhD by live coding music with Clojure our life might have taken a different turn! Dimitris does Human-Computer Interaction research, which has led to multiple incarnations of a system he calls TimeLines, which allows you to express musical structure as functions of just a single numerical argument: time itself. The latest version of TimeLines is written in Clojure, tapping into the rich Lisp heritage of live- and creative coding, which he will present, and demonstrate, for us on stage.

Nikita Prokopov - Making UI great again with Humble UI [Workshop]

Nikita, also known online as Tonsky, is no stranger in the Clojure community. No wonder, given that he doesn't lack for ambitious projects. He already did an in memory database (Datascript), a developer typeface (Fira Code), and maintains the Clojure integration for Sublime Text.

Oh and in between all of that he also set out to reinvent desktop programming with Humble UI. At a time where "desktop UI" generally means "we repackaged a full browser" Humble's Clojure+native approach is a breath of fresh air. It's no small feat bootstrapping a project like this, but four years in it's ready for you to try building your own UIs. In this Workshop Nikita wil show you how.

Jeaye Wilkerson - Caution! Jank Ahead

These are exciting times for Clojure implementations. We already had JVM Clojure, Clojure CLR, and ClojureScript. There's also SCI (the small Clojure interpreter), which powers Babashka (SCI+Graal native image) and nbb (SCI+node). And lately we've gotten Squint and Cherry as ClojureScript alternatives.

But sometimes you want that real native power. This is where jank comes in, a Clojure dialect on LLVM with C++ interop. Jeaye has been working on Jank since 2015, and after 3300 commits it sits at 90% syntax parity and ever increasing library parity. A wildly ambitious project, this will be a technical deep dive into the compiler.

Jeaye will also host "Office Hours", so bring your jank projects and questions and get your answers straight from the horse's mouth.

Heart of Clojure is proudly supported by our Gold Sponsors, Clojurists Together and Nubank