Jon Pither ClojuTRE 2017 Interview

Written by Eric Normand. Published: July 18, 2017. Updated: August 20, 2018.

Jon Pither will be giving a talk at ClojuTRE 2017. His talk is called Clojure Flavoured Devops.

Follow him on his Homepage, GitHub and Twitter.

PurelyFunctional.tv: What is your favorite feature of Clojure?

Jon Pither: The generality and plasticity of it. I can get on and write my code without falling into rigid rabbit holes of someone's design of how this mini-universe of data-structures and pieces of business logic should be governed. Data can my flow to all parts of my system and be used with minimum fuss, by the extremities as well as the core.

PF.tv: What is your least favorite feature of Clojure?

JP: The startup times. With patterns such as the 'Reloaded REPL' experience, we should be aiming to keep REPL reboots to a minimum, but I find that for any serious hacking you'll see need to junk and restart the JVM sporadically often. It'll be truly interesting to see if developers will start using ClojureScript with Node.js more to alleviate this.

PF.tv: Can you briefly describe your talk?

JP: An overview of the way we do devops - using a hefty slice of ClojureScript to achieve our needs. We use Mach which is a rewritten Make sitting on top of Lumo, and we use it to do weird and wonderful things such as provisioning our cloud infrastructure using Terraform, and to build 'project workbook' PDFs that we ship to clients.

PF.tv: Why did you choose this topic?

JP: Because for me it's interesting and fun, and the idea of leaving behind this painful world of bash scripting for a practical alternative is exciting. Look, it's a scary world out there of command line cloud provisioning and whatnot, and you're going to want a programming language that can handle data-structures.

PF.tv: What is one thing I will be able to do after watching your talk?

JP: Replace PaaS's such as AWS Beanstalk with your own ClojureScript'd tooling.

PF.tv: What are the three most important concepts I need to know to follow the conversation?

JP: TBH Relax. Perhaps an understanding of the server-side ClojureScript ecosystem wouldn't go amiss - i.e. Lumo - but I'm not going to throw people overboard because of that. The ClojureScript ecosystem is changing so much anyway... everyone will be in the same boat. Maybe go and see what a standard PaaS offering such as Beanstalk is all about before we throw it to the flames.

PF.tv: Where can people follow you online?

JP: Follow me on the JUXT Blog. I'm not a massive tweeter, but I do have a profile: @jonpither.

PF.tv: Are there any projects you'd like people to be aware of? How can people help out?

JP: Not specifically. Though I think we all need to help out where-ever in the ClojureScript space (Lumo, Planck, ClojureScript itself).

PF.tv: What one feature from another language would you like to see in Clojure?

JP: I've got a feeling good things are happening in the JAR dependency world, so I'll keep my eyes tuned there. Personally I value Clojure for the fact it's simple and small compared to other languages... long may this persist!

PF.tv: What is your favorite Clojure function or macro?

JP: some->, because I only just started using it, and it's saved me from many when-lets etc.