Heart of Clojure 2024 is Around the Corner

A few more days and hundreds of Clojure and functional programming enthusiasts will descend upon Leuven, Belgium, or tune in online, for the second edition of the Heart of Clojure conference. IT'S HAPPENING! It is becoming legitimately hard to contain my excitement! So many cool, smart, interesting people, all in one place.

And the weather gods are smiling upon us! In Belgium seasons are more a suggestion than anything you can count on, and so until a few days ago it still really wasn't clear what kind of weather we were going to get. But after the first cold spell of the season it seems like by the end of the weekend it's going to start warming up, and we expect dry and pleasant weather for the duration of the conference!

But enough talking about the weather, let's talk about all the stuff we have in store for you!

Streaming Tickets

For the longest time we weren't really sure if we'd be able to offer a live stream, but turns out we can! For the economical price of €45 you can watch all 14 talks, the lightning talks, and be part of our Discord community during the event. You can grab a live streaming ticket here. We also still have a few late birds tickets available.

Attendee Guide

If you're coming to Leuven then check out our handy Attendee Guide. We've tried to bundle as much practical information as possible. There's stuff there about travel, food, practicalities of the venues... It's an indispensible resource. If you have questions, chances are they've been already answered.

Your Conference Compass

We've talked about this in previous newsletters, the Compass app is a key ingredient for this conference. There you find the full schedule of all official and unofficial talks, workshops, and activities. It also helps you get into our Discord which is the main communication channel during the conference, and you can use it to track the amazing people you meet during the conference and want to keep in touch with.

Building something like this from scratch with the hard deadline of the conference looming was a bit of a gamble, but folks from the Gaiwan team together with several community contributors have pulled it off. It's still a little rough around the edges, and there are still a few things we hope to tidy up by Tuesday, but on the whole it does everything we had hoped it would. We haven't had much chance yet to think beyond this conference, but perhaps this would become a useful tool for other community conferences to adopt.

One of the goals with Compass was for it to tie in to Discord, and we've really delivered. Compass will give you the right Discord roles based on your ticket, so whether you're a sponsor, speaker, or someone watching the live streams, you'll automatically be given access to the right channels. We now also allow anyone who's organizing an activity to start a thread for that activity. This is like a private channel, containing everyone who signed up for that activity. Great for coordinating practical matters, sharing relevant links, or sending reminders. A big thanks to Johnny for doing these discord features.

We also wanted Compass to act as an address book. Until a few years back nearly everyone you'd meet at a tech conference would be on Twitter, it was an easy default to keep track of — and keep in touch with — people. But we all know how that went. These days people are much more scattered. So instead you can add contacts in Compass. This is done by brining up a QR code and having the other person scan it, so you can only add people you are physically near, and only with their consent. When editing your profile, you can decide which information you're ok sharing publicly (this could even be nothing at all), and which information you want your contacts to see. This feature still needs a bit of polish, but we're confident we can have it in a usable state by conference day.

Live Sets by pulu and Dimitris Kyriakoudis

We added two live music coding sets to the program. These will take place at Hal 5, starting at 20:00 on Wednesday. Talks at Het Depot will end around 18:00, then we'll give folks time to find dinner, and be back at Hal 5 in time for these performances.

Dimitris has been working on his own TidalCycles project, which represents music as pure functions over the domain of time. He'll speak about that Wednesday afternoon, and then will have a chance to demo it afterwards, although he said he might also perform using Overtone, which of course we also love to see.

Overtone is a Clojure-based live music coding environment by Sam Aaron and Jeff Rose, the former of Sonic Pi fame, and currently maintained by yours truly. Under the hood Overtone uses SuperCollider as its synthesis engine. SuperCollider has been around for several decades, and still has an active community around it.

pulu is a Finnish artist who uses SuperCollider (among other things) to create their music. Retro SuperCollider, in this case, as in their performace UFORAVE!timewarp they'll use a macbook from the early nillies running Mac OS 9 (the last Apple operating system before they switched to a Unix model in OS X), and a matching SuperCollider release.

Live recording of the defn podcast

Name a more iconic Clojure duo than Ray and Vijay ;) defn is one of the longest running Clojure podcasts, and we're very happy to give them (literally) a stage to record an episode in front of a live audience.

Early Registration and City Tour

Heart of Clojure is still a two day conference, (Wednesday 18th and Thursday 19th of September), but we already have the venue (Hal 5) available the afternoon of the 17th, so we thought, what the heck, let's already invite people over! This way we can already give most people their lanyards, which will makes things a lot easier the next morning, and it creates a great opportunity for folks to just hang. And the space will be open, so if you already want to organize an activity, then get it into compass!

We'll be there at 14:00, setting up the place. The Hal 5 food court opens at 16:00, and you're welcome to hang out there (or give us a hand). By 17:00 we hope to be ready for early registration. We'll keep the space open until 21:00 or so, Hal 5's bar closes at 23:00.

People who are interested to see a bit of Leuven and learn about its history can show up behind the train station (5 min from Hal 5) by 18:00 to join a Guided City Tour. Just like at the previous edition local historian and philosopher Toon de Kegel will show you the sights and tell you the tales of historic Leuven.