Teaching Clojure at IBM
summary
A three-person .NET team ships a JVM prototype in one month; after that month both novices say they prefer Clojure and adoption grows to nine engineers. Preparation includes ~400 hours of personal practice and SICP exercises, plus meetup teaching. Day-one priorities are REPL workflow, fast unit tests, and Prismatic schema for runtime shape checks. Training uses four-hour pair programming blocks, compromises on editor/keybindings (Cursive vs Emacs), and prebuilt deployment scaffolding to avoid tool friction.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (16)
- 0:00Intro
- 10:14First day
- 12:40Prismatic Schema
- 15:07Be ready to compromise
- 17:35Make everything easy
- 19:43Provide a style guide
- 23:41Be prepared
- 25:11Make it easy
- 27:12Success
- 28:16Tools
- 28:58Cotys
- 30:01Why Clojure
- 31:16Why Fsharp
- 32:03Building Trust
- 33:51IBM
- 35:01Conclusion
related talks
44mLearning and Teaching Clojure on the job at Amperity
34mDeepen and Diversify the Clojure Community with Jr Engineers
33mHiring Juniors: (not= "Past Experience" "Future Success")
49mTeaching functional programming to noobs
40mLessons Learned Creating a Successful Machine Learning Startup with Clojure
42mPoetry of Programming
41mAdapting Clojure to an Intro CS Classroom
30mLessons Learned: A Developer's Perspective on Teaching & Learning