Talks and Videos on Clojure

Clojure has a passionate community and undeniable strengths — so what's holding it back? Mitesh Shah openly examines the real barriers to adoption, from onboarding friction to ecosystem perception, and explores how the community can collaborate to move Clojure forward.

A lightning talk on Ornament, Gaiwan's library for defining styled components in Clojure and ClojureScript. Mitesh walks through how the defstyled macro lets you co-locate your component's tag, class name, and CSS rules in one place — without shipping any styling logic to the frontend bundle. A practical look at how Gaiwan solves the CSS problem in production Clojure projects.

Arne Brasseur shows how Gaiwan built out the Business Intelligence component of a startup's accounting platform using Clojure and Datomic. Ever since, we have been bridging the gap between Datomic and Metabase and creating a system for generating and embedding custom dashboards. The landscape changed quite a bit over that time, with Metabase evolving and Datomic Analytics arriving on the scene — and so our approach evolved as well.

A deep dive into Clojure's zipper data structure — how to navigate, edit, and reshape tree-structured data with elegance. Arne walks through the core concepts of functional zippers, from Gerard Huet's original 1997 paper through to practical application with Clojure's built-in clojure.zip namespace. A transcript and slides are available on Lambda Island.

In 2016, clojure.spec arrived with a promise of better runtime checking, improved error messages, and a shared vocabulary for communicating the structure of data. In this hands-on talk, Arne Brasseur starts with the basics and works up to more complex examples — showing how to write specs, instrument functions, parse data, and do generative testing.