Learning Clojure Through Practice - London Clojurians February Dojo

Another chance to practice Clojure with the help of the great people that are part of the London Clojurians community. Each person at the dojo has a different experience with Clojure and functional programming, so there is always something different to learn. It still amazes me how much I learn and how confident each dojo makes me (by the end of the night anyway).

Getting the coding dojo organised

We are all put in teams by our beloved leader, Bruce Durling. There is always a full house so you never get teamed up with the same people, giving great variety in what you learn each time. After your first dojo you realise its okay not to have the answers, all that is required is that you try writing code (and know how to find the Clojure docs).

I also had a chance to shore up my Emacs skills by helping others get started, although remembering all the paredit short-cuts is still work in progress. Perhaps a paredit workshop would be a good idea!

After having seen Bruce show off some code at the end, I saw the amazing Emacs Live setup created by Sam Aaron. Sam has created a great Clojure setup for his Overtone live coding sessions which are great for a dojo (autocomplete, clojure docs, undo tree, etc). Sam sent me a link to his Github repo am forking it as I blog!

The Clojure Challenge - 4Clojure

The challenge our team took for the evening was to complete some of the reasonably challenging 4Clojure problems and the ones we picked certainly were a challenge.

Our team picked some “medium” strength challenges and we managed to get two and a half problems solved in the hour and a half of the dojo.

The 4Clojure website is a great way to learn clojure by practising, i.e. deliberate practice. If you create a free account, you can also compete in the shortest solution competition, affectionately known as code golf as the lower your score the better your rank.

Our coding efforts were pushed up onto Github Gist and I am looking forward to trying out some more 4Clojure problems to keep me going until the next dojo.

Github Gists are a simple way to share code that can be forked and easily become the basis of a versioned project.

Hope to see you at the next London Clojurians event at Thoughtworks on 27th March from 6.30pm (every last Tuesday of the month).

Thank you.
@jr0cket

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