Functional Geekery Episode 46 - Kurt Schrader

In this episode I talk with Kurt Schrader. We talk about his introduction to Clojure, deciding to build a company on Clojure and Datomic, how Datomic changes your thinking about databases and more.

Our Guest, Kurt Schrader

@kurt on Twitter
Clubhouse

Announcements

On May 2nd and 3rd flatMap(Oslo) is taking place in Oslo, Norway. flatMap(Oslo) is a conference about functional programming, mainly on the JVM. The call for speakers is now open. To find out more visit http://2016.flatmap.no for more information, and make sure to use code GEEKERY when registering to find out more.

LambdaConf will be taking place May 26th – 29th in Boulder, Colorado. Keep an eye on lambdaconf.us to find out more.

PolyConf 2016 will be taking place on June 30th – July 2nd. The Call For Proposals is now open, and will be taking submissions through the 13th of March. Visit http://polyconf.com/ to keep updated with news as more details become available, and http://eventil.com/events/polyconf-16 to submit your talk proposal.

If you have a conference related to functional programming, contact me, and I will be happy to announce it.

Topics

About Kurt
How Kurt got into Clojure
Datomic
Being different enough from Java to force people to think differently
“We can always fall back to a Java library”
Cascalog
“This is just math”
Selling Clojure across the company
Deciding to build a company and start with Clojure
“There was that question of would we be able to hire people”
“You use Clojure? I want to do that”
The Python Paradox
Cursive
Using Datomic for historical view of data
“There is a self selecting group of people who want to use Datomic”
What is Datomic and what it gets you
Queries go through memory on a local box
Transition in thinking when using Datomic
You stop over thinking queries
Datalog
“You start to ask yourself ‘Why did I do thinks the old way?'”
Thinking about how to take advantage of availability of historical data
Get out into meetups and grow the community

As always, a giant Thank You goes to David Belcher for the logo design.

Episode source