ClojureScript and Apprenticeships

Apprenticeships

The increase in web development vocational programs means a steady supply of junior developers, but are we prepared to help them become productive members of our teams?

These programs were created in response to the need for more developers, but I fear without apprenticeships to bridge the gap, we're simply moving the bottleneck upstream.

In the absence of an established, structured program, I've had to figure out what it means to be a software apprentice and ensure I'm building skills and learning best practices daily. Conversely, the senior developers have had to think about how to integrate apprentices and provide purposeful learning opportunities.

In this talk, I'll share my experience coming from a vocational web development school and the apprenticeship program we're developing at Democracy Works, Inc.

Beyond hello world: building a simple ClojureScript single page web application

So you've read the blogs and thought how fun it would be to write web front ends with your favorite lisp. Perhaps you've even fired up the repl and done a little playing. But how do you get from there to a real-life app?

This talk will give a brief introduction to ClojureScript, cover using Austin to drive a browser REPL from within Emacs, configuring the Google Closure compiler to make any JavaScript library usable from ClojureScript, and finally put it all together in a map-based REST-backed single page web application.