**Appreciation**
Thank you to Capital Factory for sponsoring Austin Clojure Meetup. Capital Factory is the center of gravity for entrepreneurs in Texas. They meet the best entrepreneurs in Texas and introduce them to their first investors, employees, mentors, and customers. To sign up for a Capital Factory coworking membership, click [here](https://capital-factory.officernd.com/signup?office=5d1bcd...).

**About Austin Clojure**
Our group was formed in October 2011. Since then, it has focused on Clojure and related Lisp languages, such as Common Lisp and Scheme, all of which have strongly influenced the design of Clojure and the approach Clojure takes in approaching software design.

Clojure also has Java as its foundational platform. Clojure's focus is not on the Java language but on the JVM and associated libraries. The JVM provides massive amounts of power for Clojure b/c you can use any Java library from Clojure, and it is pretty easy and clean to do so. Existing Java libraries can be wrapped in a functional approach with Clojure, thus providing a more functional and data-oriented approach to using the libraries. It gives the libraries a Clojury and Lispy feel.

**Group Dynamics**
We encourage members who enjoy Clojure to share that passion with others by giving talks or demos of things they have been working on or have questions about. It could be a lightning talk of 5 minutes, a longer talk that takes almost an entire meeting, or something you found online and played with for a bit and think is interesting. Examples of talks include: how to write Minecraft bots, Clojure for Social Data Mining, wrapping a Java library in Clojure to make it more idiomatic to use, etc.

Another valuable and fun approach is to tag-team a talk with another group member. Often working on something together with another person makes it more fun and educational for both people as you bounce ideas and approaches off one another.

It's essential for a healthy group for all members to be engaged and contribute, so please consider sharing a talk. It'll help our group and lead to more Clojure usage. We strive to be a member-driven group, and for that to be the case, we need our members to share things they are doing and have learned.

Help us make this year the best year yet.

Thank you,

Norman Richards and Sam Griffith