Tony Kay Clojure/West 2017 Interview

Written by Eric Normand. Published: March 10, 2017. Updated: April 24, 2018.

Tony Kay will be giving a talk at Clojure/West 2017. He will be speaking about Testing Made Simple.

Follow him on GitHub.

PurelyFunctional.tv: How did you get into Clojure?

Tony Kay: ?I ?had been doing functional programming on my own time out of general interest for some time (primarily Scala and a little Haskell). I ended up being able to use Scala a bit at one job but found the complexity of the tooling and language to be a distinct disadvantage, even though I found the overall experience better than general imperative programming with Java. I switched jobs and had the opportunity to help select the technology stack. I knew I wanted strong FP support, and after careful evaluation we ended up with a full-stack Clojure/ClojureScript environment. We've since designed and managed the open-source Untangled library suite for Om Next.

PF.tv: What is your talk about?

TK: ?My talk is about a pragmatic approach to testing in the context of where we are today in terms of tools, approaches, and experience. It takes a look at testing from a "What are we trying to achieve?" standpoint, and tries to foster discussion and thought around simple approaches to effective testing.?

PF.tv: Who is your talk for?

TK: Anyone that develops software. We all test our software. Many of us test things by simply playing with them, and others do a more formal process. There is no avoiding the fact that we have to test what we write, so giving that some more consideration and thought can be a great benefit to anyone.?

PF.tv: What do you hope people will take away from the talk?

TK: ?I hope that people will leave the talk with two things: some practical things they can start doing right away, and a tendency to question how they do testing over time. Software development is a young and growing field, and the talk is aimed at providing better insights into the benefits and challenges of various kinds of testing, as well as pointi ng out areas where things are still improving.

PF.tv: What concepts do you recommend people be familiar with to maximize their experience with the talk?

TK: ??People that have tried their hand at some form of automated testing will probably get the most out of the talk, but I hope developers of all experience levels will take away something useful?.

PF.tv: What resources are available for people who want to study up before the talk?

TK: ???There are many resources on testing. I think Rich's talk "Simple Made Easy" is a great starting point in challenging the dogma of testing culture (e.g. that testing should drive design), but it would also be useful to know some concrete things about testing tools: unit testing, mocking, behavioral approaches, and design-by-contract.

PF.tv: Where can people follow you online?

TK: ?I have a number of talks on YouTube, mostly about Om Next or the Untangled Web libraries. I do open-source contributions through GitHub at http://github.com/awkay.?

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

TK: ??The Untangled libraries (including Untangled Spec, a behavioral testing library) are meant to be a complementary set of libraries for developing full-stack Om Next applications. Contributions are welcome. http://untangled-web.github.io/untangled/