Some notes of tonights meeting on the Stockholm Clojure User Group

[Linus Ericsson]

Hello!

We meet to discuss a bit on future plans for the Stockholm Clojure Community, which seems to be growing in a steady pace (we are like 170 persons in the Meetup group already!).

Some things we addressed:

- new members of the community, what do you want? Is various introductions/getting started sessions valuable? Reply to this thread, email me privately or what ever.

- Functional conferences in Europe this spring

There were some interest to visit some functional conference in Europe this spring. Could we go there togheter? There we're a lot of various conferences mentioned in the meeting, fill me in!

One was Lambda days in Krakow, 26-27 February (quite soon!) [1]

- Make some open source project (of course!). This could be one of many good things to dive into when doing a meetup.

- More emails to this list. Some mentioned that the speed of development in the echosystem is superfast, and that they enjoy even more selected tips of projects and techniques that someone has tried out or found after some research. And no, you're most likely NOT the LAST person finding out about a certain thing. Post things, preferably with some of your own thoughts on things you  find really useful!

- Various subjects for meetup/conference-speeches were suggested, among them "getting started with" Cursive, vim, emacs/elisp.

- Building a voluntary register of people supporting/knowing/enjoying Clojure in the Stockholm area could be a good way to encourage people to advocate Clojure for use in companies, only being able to show up a list of dozens or even hundreds of local Clojure supporters would make it possible to prove that the language has support in the community, and is not just another obscure little pet-project.

- We discussed other communities in the Stockholm area, among them the Ruby-community with weekly or almost weekly meetups, and a very large crowd, Python is similarly sized. Node also has a large group of supporters. The conclusion is that it would be most suitable to aim for a meetup of about 10-20 persons, since that manageable with regards to food-budget and facility size. The Ruby community have had meetups with over seventy people, which requires a higher ambition that we think is possible at the moment.

- The current rate of meetups (approx one every two months) seems to be a good rate. Better planning ahead makes it easier for people with crowded schedules to attend.

- Fun formats for a meetup:
-- Coding games and other quite scoped paths (like figwheel [2] that comes with a Flappy Birds clone), a browser based environment is a good way to have a quick-setup environment

-- Clojure boot camp with camp fire, sauna, hammocks etc

-- Clojure cruise to Helsinki

- Ways to make ourselves heard

-- A short, concise note on the central clojure mailing list if anyone in the area missed us

-- material in Swedish for people that are less fluent in English (and for native Swedish speakers who likes to gain maximum understanding of the subject)

-- A magazine on paper with quite high ambitions on content, and very long between the issues (like once or twice a year, at most). (Linus' pet project at the moment)

-- A one-day/one-afternoon functional programming conference in the Stockholm area

- We discussed ClojureBridge which is an exciting format to introduce women into Clojure programming. We are very open to help out with it, it would be very helpful to have at least one non-male person in the group behind it. I signed up at the ClojureBridge website. You can sign up to! [3]

Upcoming events:

- one more meetup in Mars

- one conference trip togheter in May~

Thanks to everyone that showed up!

/Linus

[1] http://www.lambdadays.org/
[2] https://github.com/bhauman/lein-figwheel
[3] http://www.clojurebridge.org/