The turn of 2021 is marked for us by participation in the re:Clojure conference held on December 3-4. It was a significant and joyful event for the Freshcode team. We thank all participants and coordinators for this great opportunity to share thoughts and ideas about enriching the Clojure ecosystem.
But first things first. Here is a brief story of Freshcode's journey into the universe of Clojure development, including the re:Clojure planet 🪐
We first shook hands with Clojure in 2013, and all these years were an incredible journey full of challenges and achievements. Our main motivator was Artem Barmin and his enthusiasm for functional programming, especially in Haskell, Common Lisp, and Clojure. The latter became the pivotal point for Freshcode, shaping the guidelines for our company development.
The first Clojure-based product developed by Freshcode was an eCommerce platform for smart shopping. Eight years ago, faced with the decision between Ruby on Rails and Clojure, we decided to go with the latter. And today, we have a skilled Clojure team and multiple successfully delivered Clojure products in our portfolio.
Also, we have implemented training for our developers to help them switch from other programming languages to Clojure.
In 2021, we focused on analyzing the Clojure community and Clojure implementation across different software products worldwide. And that was where the new story began.
It was time to translate our desires and ideas into action. We decided to find ways to contribute to the Clojure community. This required a thorough analysis of its current state, needs, and pain points.
Throughout 2020-21, our marketing department conducted several surveys, gathering insights from Clojure developers. We collected and analyzed practitioners' perspectives on the benefits and issues to understand community development challenges.
To gather feedback, the Freshcode marketing team has interviewed 52 programmers from different parts of the world, asking the following questions:
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We have compiled all the data into the eBook 'Mythbusters: Why You Shouldn't Be Afraid of Clojure'. You can download it for free here.
The Freshcode team thanks all the people who participated in our survey for their time and feedback 🙂
In 2021, we conducted one more research on the state of the Clojure tooling ecosystem through interviews with Clojure experts. Our goal was to understand several related issues. We analyzed Clojure tooling approaches, evaluating their strengths and weaknesses.
The first results were highlighted in the "Multitude Of Clojure Tools: Huge Advantage Or Big Problem?" article.
We thank Sean Corfield and Daniel Slutsky for sharing their thoughts on the subject.
Our marketing department, in collaboration with the Freshcode Clojure team, has prepared several other articles showcasing insights from Clojure developers, real-life cases, and tips for beginners on how to start with Clojure.
The main idea was to find a way to enhance Clojure's ergonomics and eliminate friction points, such as time wasted on choosing libraries or architecture.
By the way, Freshcode welcomes your ideas and contributions to Clojure research. Please, get in touch with us to discuss this.
Step by step, we reached the conclusion that we need to gather the experiences of Clojure developers in one place.
The Freshcode team decided to aggregate all available knowledge into a well-structured system. In 2021, we started the development of Clojure.garden, a content curation platform that organizes information flow about Clojure libraries, making it easier and quicker to find suitable tools.
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We presented our research results at the re:Clojure conference held on December 3-4, 2021. This step was crucial to validate our goals and ideas, and to discuss them with Clojure experts.
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We are happy to help businesses advancing their products with Clojure. The Freshcode team is always ready to collaborate in achieving a bright future of Clojure together 🤝 Please, get in touch with us to discuss details.
P.S.: Here you'll find an interview with Artem Barmin, focusing on the re:Clojure 2021 conference (you can either listen to the podcast or read the transcribed interview).
