First Bristol dojo

[Matt Thompson]

Does anyone know where a good location for our first dojo would be? Eventually we'll want somewhere with a projector for talks, but to start off with just any room will do.

[Richard]

Seconded!

If you want idea of the sort things we can do in the Dojo's check out the history of the London group:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/london-clojurians

especially anything that links to github.

Richard

[Tom Coupland]

We've hosted user groups in Nokia's offices before and i'm sure you'd be welcome. The office is on wine street, just by st nics market, so nice and central.

What level of interest have you got from the bristoljs crowd? Sounds like they really liked the look of clojurescript!

[Richard]

Hi Tom,

Welcome to the group.

I thought Matt’s presentation of Clojure and demonstration of light table IDE was terrific. A few of us were interested in a Clojure group. I attended a couple of Dojo’s in London, run by londonclojurians.org and would like to see something similar here.

If you know someone at Nokia who can help, that would be great.

Looking forward to seeing you at the first meeting!

 Richard

(PS. Tom, I think I may of accidentally deleted your post -- sorry! Here it is below)

[Tom Coupland]

Hi Richard,

I do know someone at Nokia that would be very keen to help. Namely me :)

Having started our Clojure adoption at Nokia about 2 years ago, i reckon there'll also be quite a few others keen to come along as well.

What kind of subject are you thinking for the first meeting? 4clojure, euler or do have something more web based in mind? Having a mess around with Om could be interesting and we might get some interest from our web teams as well.

[Matt Thompson]

Hi Tom, Richard,

Using Nokia’s offices would be a great help, thanks for suggesting that. A couple of people came forward after the BristolJS talk expressing interest in a dojo, and there seem to be some people on Twitter that might want to come along too.

I think that the exercises on 4clojure and project euler are great for learning Clojure. I really want to promote Clojure as a language for creating things, though. It’d be great to get together and make plugins for Light Table, weird sounds with Overtone, or visual art with Quil. There are loads of Clojure projects out there for creative coding that would be a blast to learn in a group, especially if we can integrate them with Light Table.

I’d be very excited to mess around with Om. Maybe that would be a good first dojo?

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "bristolclojurians" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to bristolclojuri...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Richard East]

Hi Tom and Matt,

Tom – that’s great! Nokia’s office is lovely. I came to one
BrisFuntional talk there and I was sad to hear the meetup is stopping.

I’m still very, very new… So 4clojure would be good for me, but not a
fun dojo for everyone. J

Here’s the format of London Clojure Dojo’s…

You’d turn up, with laptop, write you name on a sticker, so people
would find it easy remembering names… (I found that really useful.)
Bruce, one of the organisers was very friendly and open and would put
everyone at ease. He was Canadian and insisted on hugging everyone! It
helped break the ice.

There was white board up. It has the wifi password and a list of ideas
for the dojo. Anyone could add as many ideas as they wanted on the
night.

Examples:
Roman numeral converter (it was a running joke appearing at every meeting)
“turning one data structure to another” (Another running joke)
Playing with Overtone
What can do you draw on the canvass in html
Sudoku solver
Hangman
I’m sure Quil was done one week.
Etc…

(So all of your suggestions for Quil, Om, light-table are perfect for
the ideas board.)

Then they’d have pizza. More chatting, setting up environments for newbies.

Bruce would bring everyone together. Sometimes there could be a five
minute talk.

Next everyone would introduce themselves and say what they do, why
they’re interested in Clojure and how much experience they had. I
discovered a lot of developers were hardcore lispers and serious
Clojure developers, but another running joke was if you had a book on
Clojure, you were an expert!, so it made the newbies more comfortable.

They’d go through the list of ideas, often with an explanation of what
the idea was and if you like an idea it would get a tick. You could
vote for as many as you liked. The top three or four would be voted on
by the group. Then either everyone would do the same challenge or
they’d pick the top two challenges to do. Depending on the number of
attendees we’d get placed into groups of mixed abilities. And get
coding… During this time, some of the more experienced may pop between
groups to help if you’re stuck. Everything was co-operative rather
then competitive.

After 90mins or so everyone would stop and then the each group would
present what they’d done. Often people would put their code on github
the next day or go away and work on it further. (If you ever have time
you can see some examples on their google group.)

I really enjoyed that format. It was fun. Failure in the dojo wasn’t
scary and some people did some great things in a short time. It’s
become so popular that it’s on twice a month.

I’d like to give that go again here in Bristol. It means we don’t have
to think ahead for something to do and the group gets to decide and
direct it. With time we can tinker with the format. Personally I would
like to promote something as fun as possible.

The London group has a separate meeting a month for hour long talks at
https://skillsmatter.com/, which I hope we can do eventually too.

What do you think?

Richard

[Tom Coupland]

Sounds like a lot of fun! I'd heard they made a text based adventure game as well :) Although the idea of doing something practical is a good one, can be tempting to present as a toy and 'just for fun', but that does it a disservice.

Richards idea sounds like we could do both! In that people can just choose whatever they want to do, depends a bit on numbers. The only negative i can think of is that the session lacks a bit of direction and people that know nothing can get a bit lost. Making sure that doesn't happen will come down to the people that do know on the night i guess. 

Having a few ideas in the bag wouldn't hurt though, get a thread going on here in the run up would be good.

It was a shame about Brisfunc, it just didn't get the numbers. I only made it twice myself, which was a real shame. I think the guys have thought about what happen quite a bit, so hopefully some learning can be gained there.

What kind of time frame for the first one are you guys thinking? Got to try and choose a day that doesn't clash with any of the other nights!

[Richard East]

I understand what you mean about getting lost.

The last few times I tried learning Clojure , I was biting off too
much – there’s Clojure and then there’s the IDEs. (I want to learn
emacs, but I fear I’ve spent too long using Eclipse.) (I also had
pneumonia at the time, but that’s another story!)

I felt I was in at the deep end but from the great stuff that was
being produced in the meeting, I didn’t mind, because I knew Clojure
was a language worth learning because it produces results. I think
other devs can be put off. We’ve definitely want to make sure people
want to keep coming back and not to be intimidated.

I was at Bristech last week and someone was saying what’s the point of
Functional languages – what can you really do with them? I was quick
to defend them as I’ve seen the results.

As you say, I hope we can learn from BrisFunc.

I’m ready to meet soon for a dojo. I think I’m free most nights as
long as I don’t clash with my wife’s monthly book club. If you think
we need to do a bit more planning before we announce our first dojo,
I’d be happy for us to meet as a smaller group to talk it over or to
try a test run.

Richard

[Tom Coupland]

Well if we go with the 'turn up and white board' idea, then doesn't need too much planning. Although i wonder if that's a format the london guys arrived at after getting a base level of interest, so they didn't need to put so much effort into planning.

Maybe we should create a Meetup group, get people to sign up and just ask for a 1-5 of clojure knowledge and ask a question aimed at finding out what they'd like to gain from the session. Then we'll know, roughly, how many people and what groupings we might have. Then we can plan a little around what we've got.

This was your guys initiative though, just very keen to help :)

[Matt Thompson]

I just realised that you don’t have to pay for every Meetup group that you have: paying for Meetup means that you can host up to 3 groups without paying more. As I’m already hosting a Meetup group, I can set up a Clojure one without paying extra. So… I’ll do that now!

The white board idea is good, but we also want more directed activities for newcomers to Clojure. Maybe carefully planned topics would be a good idea at the start, then we can move to the more flexible whiteboard style as Tom suggested the London guys might have done.

But yeah, gauging skill and interest levels from Meetup is probably best.

[Matt Thompson]

OK, I have set up a Meetup group. Here it is: http://www.meetup.com/Bristol-Clojurians

[Richard East]

Hi,

Well done getting the meet up group sorted.

Tom – I really appreciate what you’ve already done for us – it’s your
initiative too now.

I think you’re both right about the whiteboard. Having something more
definite to pin (at least) the first few meeting will help get the
ball rolling. It maybe we will always have a theme to the dojo.

As the least experienced Clojurian, may I suggest a light table themed
dojo? It looks friendlier then emacs and vi for the beginner and it
has the wow factor. What do you think?

The next question is when shall we have the first meet up?

Richard

[Dave Barker]

Some quick ideas off the top of my head:

1. Some musical project using Overtone http://overtone.github.io/
2. A plugin for Lighttable. (I thought a split-pane Markdown preview / edit mode would be cool, think we could write it in Clojurescript using a JS Markdown library.)
3. Simple game like Pacman. (Getting your head around a game is quite a good exercise for learning functional programming as games revolve around state.)
4. We could work on some http://www.4clojure.com/ puzzles.
5. Something web-dev related, perhaps using Om or Hoplon.

Cheers, Dave.

[Matt Thompson]

I agree with doing a dojo on Light Table, it allows for a very gentle introduction to Clojure. You really need a good REPL to get the most out of the language, and learning emacs and Clojure at the same time would just be too much.

I've had a look at Overtone before. I wouldn't say that familiarity with Supercollider is needed, but I found that it helped me to understand what's going on. I think knowledge of how audio synthesis works is more important.

Overtone doesn't limit you to synth stuff, though. Chris Granger made a drum machine/sample triggerer with a CLJS UI: www.chris-granger.com/2012/02/20/overtone-and-clojurescript/. Making something like that would be cool.

Have you guys seen the synth that Rich Hickey made with Overtone? It's early days yet, but looks promising: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhkdyCPYgLs

I think that dojos on Light Table, Om (and how to set up CLJS, because it's tricky), games, Quil and Overtone would be a good start. That would be a good order to do them in, I think. Then we can start doing the whiteboard format and help people with their own projects and start on 4clojure/project Euler.

Do you think there would be any interest in using Clojure for data science? I really recommend this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVmY2lQ4DHE

[Tom Coupland]

Lighttable definitely makes sense and making noises is always fun. Sounds like a good fun topic for a first meetup. We could just follow the blog post together i guess and see what happens.

Like the idea of doing a data science based, could perhaps alternate between those kind of topics. Not seen that edmund talk, definitely going on the watch list! 

[Tom Coupland]

Ok, got agreement we can hold the first one in Nokia's offices, just trying my luck for some pizza funding.

The next two weeks are pretty clear for me. Just to get the ball rolling, how about Tuesday the 25th? Gives us a bit of time to sort out exactly what we're going to do and tell everyone about it.

I reckon we're going to want to be pretty clear about what we're going to do and how it's going to happen, to begin with at least. So say we create a repo that has a bare cljs/lighttable plugin in (just having run the lein new whatever), then ask everyone that turns up to have lighttable downloaded and that repo checked out. Then people can create named dir in there and everyone can push their stuff back. This allows a show and tell to happen at the end without everyone messing with the projector.

I'm not completely sure about the idea of a lighttable plugin first, people might end up spending the time just wondering around trying to get anything at all to happen. If we go straight to om, we can start people with 'hello world' in the browser and then move on to... i dunno, showing some twitter data or displaying some graphs. Something that gets them writing bare clojure code and interacting with a datasource of some kind.

[Richard East]

Hi,

25th’s good for me --- thanks Tom.

I'd vote down a plug-in for the first dojo as I don’t know light table
yet. But the crowd will decide :) !

My vote would be to write a a basic game on the html canvas and for
the second would be to port it to quil. (And a third would be to
create a general library that can deploy to quil and html canvass.)

Having a common place where we can download/upload code is a great idea too.

Richard

[Matt Thompson]

25th works for me too.

I think that Om is really useful and is a killer app for CLJS, but it's a bit hard to set up and explain. You need to understand how ReactJS works, etc.

Making a simple game could be the way forward. I'll see if I can get a lein plugin submitted for a simple game skeleton (so people can do lein new game). Otherwise, I could just make a github repo.

Is it safe to assume that everyone will know git? I like Tom's show and tell idea. If git is too complicated, maybe we can just use a shared Dropbox folder?

2014年3月13日木曜日 10時24分49秒 UTC Richard:

[Matt Thompson]

OK, I'm about to announce our first dojo on meetup.com. Tuesday 25th March, 7pm, Nokia offices. The theme will be making a basic game in CLJS. Is this OK with everyone?

2014年3月13日木曜日 14時12分59秒 UTC Matt Thompson:

[Andrew McGregor]

> Eventually we'll want somewhere with a projector for talks

Happy to loan one any time.  Bought one for BristolJS and used it, er, twice, perhaps even once.  Actually you'd be doing me a favour justifying the purchase :|

[Tom Coupland]

Yep, sounds good to me, I have no idea how to do that mind! 

Have you got a basic game built? Is it achievable in a couple of hours to get something going?

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the Google Groups "bristolclojurians" group.
To unsubscribe from this topic, visit https://groups.google.com/d/topic/bristolclojurians/T89Us45nXLk/unsubscribe.
To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to bristolclojuri...@googlegroups.com.

[Matt Thompson]

I was thinking of taking the code from Chris Granger's live coding demo http://www.chris-granger.com/2012/02/26/connecting-to-your-creation/ and putting it into a skeleton app to edit in Light Table. Then people can just edit the parts that control how the game works without having to worry about drawing to canvas, etc.

[Joe Littlejohn]

Hi Matt,

Great news that you're setting up a Bristol Clojure group. I'm looking forward to the dojo, can I make a suggestion re the start time?

The front door of the Prudential Buildings (where our Nokia offices are) closes at 7pm, sometimes a few minutes before. From 7pm it's more difficult to get people into the building because someone has to run down from the 5th floor to the basement, then out to the front of the building to collect them. With latecomers arriving sporadically this becomes a bit of a chore, and the whole thing is a bit less welcoming.

If you can move the meetup to 6.30pm, the bulk of the attendees will be able to make their own way in (we'll put up some signs to welcome them) and the door being locked at 7pm won't cause as much disruption.

[Matt Thompson]

OK, no problem. I've just updated the event with the new time of 6:30pm.

Thanks,

Matt

[Tom Coupland]

Hey guys,

Just some final notes for accessing the building on Tuesday:

The front door to the office is closed at seven pm, up to then someone will be there to get people in and into the lifts up to the fifth floor were we have one of our conference rooms booked for the evening. At quarter past seven i'll come round to the front to let any stragglers into the building through the back door. After that people will have to drop a message into the group (here or some other means) and someone will come down.

We've got some pizza fund so we'll have something to eat, but it's a dry site so no beers :(

Ideally we'll be wrapped up by ten pm. After that there's alarms to be set and other things to put the building to sleep that have to be done. Seems like a reasonable time to me anyway. People need to ensure they leave via the basement, going back out the front door will set of the alarms. I'll put up signs and there's going to be a good few people that know their way around about, so it shouldn't be hard to have an someone lead the way. Fairly sure a few people will be pudward bound for nightcap at the point.

Think that's it, see you all then!

Tom

[Matt Thompson]

Sweet! Good job on the pizza. Thanks, Tom.

See you tomorrow,
Matt

2014年3月23日日曜日 16時06分13秒 UTC Tom Coupland: