On Datomic, Reagent & Watchman

A rough timetable for the evening:

19:00 Pizza
19:30 Talk #1 by Eric Lavigne
20:30 Break
20:45 Talk #2 by Marc O'Morain
21:15 Finish

(The first talk will be over Google Hangouts from Florida.)

Talk #1: Ranking System for PlanetsNu, using Clojure, Datomic, and Reagent

"PlanetsNu is a turn-based military strategy game with 11 races based on Star Trek, Star Wars, and Battlestar Galactica. Each race has their own unique abilities and ship designs (e.g. Borg assimilation, Romulan spying, and Empire dark sense). While the game is primarily about interstellar warfare, skilled play also requires diplomacy, economic development, and logistics.

"Game trailer: http://youtu.be/GaT39wAIkbI

"PlanetsNu players that enjoy a challenge need to find opponents with similar ability. Unfortunately, the official ranking system is not a good measure of playing ability because it also allows players to climb the ranking by playing a lot of games or by blowing up a lot of ships. Some players reach the highest ranks without winning games at all, and even championship games sometimes include relatively unskilled players with inflated ranks.

"This Clojure application ranks players based on their ability to win games, especially in difficult starting positions or against other high-ranked players. Game history is downloaded from a public API, stored in a Datomic database, and analyzed to estimate each player's performance. Player ranks and related statistics are displayed using a ClojureScript library called Reagent."

Speaker Profile for Eric Lavigne: "Eric is the Director of Software Development for MCNA Systems. MCNA uses Clojure to develop software for managing Medicaid insurance plans, and will be opening an office in Ireland sometime this year. "

Talk #2: Clojure Watchman

Description: "I've been writing a Clojure library to interface Clojure with Facebook's Watchman. I'm going to use this project to demonstrate how to create and publish a Clojure library, how to test it, and talk through some of the problems that I have faced interfacing with native unix sockets from the JVM."

Speaker Profile for Marc O'Morain: "Marc is a Dublin based programmer working for CircleCI. At CircleCI we exclusively use Clojure and ClojureScript to build our product."