Heart of Clojure - An Indeterminate Consequential Conference

After coming back to Taiwan, a LinkedIn post written by a Clojurian who attended Heart of Clojure soon caught my eye.

Perhaps it's time for some small, new, and incredibly neat and performant Clojure-based consultancy to be born, hmm?

It sounds like the author is planning to bring Clojure to his neighborhood, company, or country. No matter which one it is, I hope he will be successful.

Seeing this post, I couldn't help but think of the opening talk, which manifested that attending a conference can have indeterminate but consequential effects.

Indeterminate Consequential

Years ago, after I successfully delivered a Clojure/Datomic solution to a Taiwanese enterprise, I reached a point where I needed to rethink my career. Clearly, I had two possible options:

1. Improve my English and try to get a Clojure job in Europe or the U.S.
2. Improve my business skills and try to create a Clojure job for myself in Taiwan.

I couldn't decide, so I attended a Clojure conference in London. That was the first time I had been to a Clojure conference, and most developers I spoke to on that trip had no experience using Datomic in production.

An epiphany struck: Perhaps I am a developer with better business skills than English skills. Great, let me build on my strength and choose option 2.

Several years later, while option 2 has not yet fully succeeded, I am now programming in Clojure as part of my day job. In hindsight, it was the experience of attending that conference that determined my career path.

Clojure Migrates to a New Land

At Heart of Clojure, there was one talk that answered a question I had been searching for a long time: the talk about replacing IBM AS/400 with Clojure/Datomic at a German car manufacturer.

From my experience, this kind of job seemed impossible. The challenge wasn't technical but related to people's decisions. In enterprises, strict rules are often set around databases. However, the speakers had successfully achieved this. I had to know why.

The story was rugged and wild. The breakthrough came when the speakers discovered that the Italy branch wasn’t using AS/400 directly because the AS/400 had only a German-language interface. As a result, they were allowed to deploy the Clojure/Datomic solution. Without this talk, I would never have imagined that the key to gaining permission for deployment could be something like that.

Activities Are Like Black Holes

At the Heart of Clojure conference, I used the Compass App to remind me when the next talk I wanted to attend was, and I joined many activities. Or, to put it another way, I was drawn into many activity black holes.

We talked about many things:

• Where are you from?
• Culture
• History
• Career
• Industry
• The experience of being the only Clojurian among many non-Clojure colleagues.

I couldn’t explain why I fell into so many conversations, as I never considered myself an extrovert. From time to time, I found it difficult to leave one conversation to go to the next talk.

It felt like we were brothers and sisters of the same religion. Or perhaps, not just spiritually, we even shared some biological similarities.

Bring HoC to Your Home

If after Heart of Clojure, you make a significant resolution—something great but difficult to achieve—don’t worry. You are not alone.

I originally only thought about bringing Clojure home, but now, I’m considering bringing Heart of Clojure home as well.