Talks
Events

Teaching Clojure at IBM

Steve Shogren at Clojure/conj 2015

We had a month till the industry conference. It had to run on JVM. We are a .NET shop. We tallied the team's skills other than C#: Ruby, Java, Python, PHP, Scala, Perl, and Clojure. Not a single overlapping language between us.

"Who would feel comfortable having to train everyone else?"

I put myself forward for Clojure. A month later we shipped.

Here's the report of how I became confident enough to suggest Clojure as an option and then train the rest of the team. I'll cover the skills and attitudes that I believe made the project a success. I'll also make suggestions for what can reduce the friction of introducing Clojure at your company.

About the speaker: I am a software engineer, writer, and dev manager. I co-organize Clojadelphia, the Philadelphia Clojure meetup. I author the development blog Deliberate Software, where I write about Clojure, F#, and skills for new developers.

I have a passion for training and learning. I previously worked as a middle school teacher, then later as a developer trainer. I've found Clojure to be the tool that gives me the longest lever between my skill and the problem, so it is the tool I grab for first. Therefore, most of my teaching these days is around Clojure.