HYBRID: Clojure Virtual Threads, CSS Accessibility, and Theory of Constraints

We have three talks this month!

Agenda:
- 6:30pm arrive and eat (pizza)
- 7:00pm talks (3 x 15+5m)
- 8:00pm official business ends, stay for informal discussion and food

Live Stream

Talk 1: Eric Normand

Virtual Threads in Clojure
JDK 21 provides virtual threads which allow for much more concurrency than OS threads. In this talk, we'll see how to use them from Clojure, how they differ from OS threads, and what might change in the future.

Bio
Eric Normand is a Clojure and functional programming teacher. He has been programming in Clojure since 2008 and teaching it since 2013. You can find him online at ericnormand.me.

Talk 2: Sayan Sivakumaran

How does CSS affect the Accessibility Tree?
It's a common misconception that HTML is the only thing that affects how assistive technologies (like screen readers) interact with the web, even though that isn't true. For example, did you know that the CSS border styling of table cells affects whether small HTML tables are exposed as a table in the accessibility tree or not? Other types of CSS can change how the accessibility tree is exposed as well - there has been an attempt to standardize this behavior with the CSS-AAM, although there doesn't seem to have been a lot of work in this area recently.

Let's explore some of the weird, implementation-defined ways that CSS can affect the accessibility tree!

Bio
Sayan Sivakumaran is a developer at Singlewire that has done open source work on both Chromium accessibility and the ARIA specification suite (more specifically, the Core-AAM). While they are taking a temporary break from open source accessibility work to explore systems programming, making the web more accessible is still something that they hold close to their heart!

Talk 3: David Whittington

Exploring Clojure as a Theory of Constraints modeling environment
The "Theory of Constraints" (TOC) is a management philosophy introduced by Dr. Eliyahu M. Goldratt in his 1984 book titled "The Goal". It is designed to help organizations continually achieve their goals by identifying and managing constraints that hinder performance. The central premise of TOC is that every system, regardless of how well it performs, has at least one constraint that limits its ability to achieve more of its goals.

Various software software tools exist to support the TOC modeling process, but they're generally not hacker friendly. Can we do better in Clojure? Let's tinker and find out.

Bio
David Whittington is a system architect at PDS, Inc. where he is helping build ar.io, an access protocol for the Arweave perpetual data storage network. Previously he has worked on streaming metrics indexing and simulation testing for satellite systems, a ClojureScript strategy game (Zetawar), pharmacy claims processing systems, and early IaaC systems. He enjoys free software, permissionless systems, functional programming, optimizing databases, and immutability.