Boulder Clojurians: Adventures with Clojure.spec

Hey Clojurians!

We are looking forward to our May MeetUp hosted by our very own Eric Siefkas on Adventures in Clojure.spec.

We will be providing brews and snacks for the discussion. More details on the subject will be posted closer to the event.

About the event

Clojure.spec has made a large splash ever since it was announced in the middle of last year. As a dynamic language, Clojure has to make a tradeoff between flexibility and specificity. The core of Clojure seemed to favor flexibility, meaning specification of the inputs and outputs were generally left to comments or tests. There have been several attempts by third parties to swing the pendulum the other way. The most notable of these being prismatic.schema and clojure.typed. These gained a decent amount of momentum, and offered more fine grain control over the shape of the data in your program. Enter Clojure.spec, Rich Hickey’s answer to flexibility vs specificity argument. There are many talks and blog posts out there on the basic syntax and capability of clojure.spec in contrived examples. My goal for this talk is to show how even a complete spec beginner can leverage specs to create value in real world situations.

The talk will be an experience report on using clojure.spec as part of a client project for the first time. Walking through the learning process from understanding the basic concepts, all the way to leveraging specs to create compelling generative tests.

About the speaker - Eric Siefkas - Think Topic Senior Software Engineer

Prior to joining ThinkTopic, Eric spent several years at Rally Software where he had the opportunity to work on many different parts of the system. Along the way he found a passion for writing distributed software in a functional way. He is excited to now dive into machine learning and whatever else the future brings. His expertise is in distributed systems, databases, functional programming and system level design. In his free time he enjoys supermoto racing, tinkering on anything with a motor, PC gaming and snowboarding. Eric has a B.S. in computer science from Colorado State University

Cheers,
ThinkTopic