The holiday season is know for over indulge, so why not stuff your head full of Clojure and functional programming. Its far healthier than the alternatives :)

To help you indulge, Arne from LambdaIsland, Bobby Towers, Alexander Oloo and I are writing a blog post each day as part of the Advent Of Parens 2019 celebration. Every day we plan to publish a short posts that share tips and experiences with functional programming and Clojure.

You can find the articles I am planning to write on the practicalli blog project board.

While you wait to open these posts each day of December, I am kickstarting your feast of Clojure in this article.

I also encourage you to take some time over the holiday season to practice Clojure

• Clojure Advent of Code
• Practicalli Clojure study group

Discover new ideas with Clojure videos

Clojure TV YouTube channel has hundreds of videos from Clojure Conj conferences over the last 6 years. Some of my favourites include

• Follow the Data: Product Development in Clojure - Derek Troy-West
• From Lazy Lisper to Confident Clojurist - Alexander Oloo
• Interactive Programming for Artificial Intelligence - Dragan Djuric
• Sherlock Holmes, Consulting Developer - Stuart Halloway

Or just sit back and watch all the amazing Clojure/conj 2019 talks back to back

reClojure conference videos will be available soon, subscribe to find out when the are published

Studying Clojure

For the last year I have run a YouTube based study and there are over 50 hours of video, introducing Clojure concepts and building applications with Clojure and ClojureScript.

See the Clojure Study group playlist for all the videos. I am currently creating videos to introduce Clojure CLI and tools.deps approach to Clojure and ClojureScript projects.

TODO create a playlist for just the 4Clojure solutions

start learning Clojure CLI and tools.deps approach for Clojure

Discuss any of the content that Practicalli creates on the #practicalli channel of the Clojurians Slack community.

There are several excellent professional courses and tutorials available to help you deep dive into specific areas. Take some time out and learn something new for the new year.

• Lambda Island - high quality and effective video tutorials on Clojure, with detailed transcripts
• Purelyfunctional.tv - comprehensive training courses for Clojure
• Learn re-frame - a detailed video-based course from an experienced JavaScript & ClojureScript developer, Jacek Schae

Cool projects to try out

Bobby Towers has some excellent projects that are very creative and inspiring projects, so great fun for all over the holiday season.

• Games: Conways Game of Life, Sudoku, Minesweeper, Tic-tac on my toe
• Music: MECCA Music Platform, Exploring MIDI files,
• Graphics: Convert images into SVG

Michiel Borkent has been a prolific developer in the Clojure community, creating many excellent projects this year. It is definitely worth investing a little time getting to know these projects

• re-find - to find a function based on arguments and expected return value. Try the re-find website too.
• clj-kondo - my favourite Clojure lint tool that can be used interactively in your editor or as a script in a CI or other batch process.
• jet - a command line tool to transform between JSON, EDN and Transit
• babashka - when you want to write Clojure rather than a bash script

Clojure podcasts

There are many engaging discussions on Clojure and functional programming in the following podcasts.

• Apropos cast - an eclectic discussion and collaborative hack session with Clojure.
• clojurescript podcast - with many Clojure and ClojureScript contributors, giving a deep insight into the language and development aproach.
• clojure design club - a very enjoyable discussion between two experienced developers working with Clojure, discussing issues raised by the community.
• cognicast - a long running podcast from the stewards of the Clojure language
• defn podcast - an enjoyable but occasionally sweary podcast by one of the characters in the Clojure community.
• The REPL - regular news about Clojure and activities in the community (also a mailing list)
• JUXT Cast - a new broadcasts from the development team at JUXT, a very active Clojure consultancy company

I listen to these podcasts when I go for a walk in the park or shopping for fresh fruit and vegetables.

Summary

I hope you enjoy the rich content available in the Clojure community and have a very merry Clojure holiday season.

If there are any topics or tips you need help with, please get in touch via the Clojurians Slack community.