You blink and half a year has passed, can you believe it? Most of 2019 is already behind us, but when it comes to Lambda Island the best is yet to come.

It’s been a while since you’ve heard from us, maybe you’ve gotten the impression Lambda Island has gone dormant, but nothing could be further from the truth. We’ve been working hard behind the scenes, planting seeds, and getting ready for a new start.

We’re growing!

Last week Davide Taviani joined Gaiwan, the company behind Lambda Island, single-handedly doubling the team count.

Davide’s first job is to make some long needed improvements to the Lambda Island site, and to improve the experience of the learners. He’ll also be working on content like episodes and blog posts, as well as expanding the business in some exciting new directions.

Message from Davide:

Hello world!

I am very excited to be here and to be part of the team :-)

As Arne mentioned, my first priority is going to be dedicating some love to the Lambda Island codebase, so expect some streamlining and improvements across the board in the near future. I am also looking forward to help tracing new routes and exploring more of the yet untamed landscape of our Island!

Have your Say

This month we have a simple question for you: which topic would you like to see covered on Lambda Island, either on the blog or as an episode?

Survey: Topic Requests

We’ll summarize the results in the next newsletter!

Improving the Team Experience

So far Lambda Island has been specialized in one thing: helping individuals achieve mastery in their craft. When people sign up for a subscription they know that is what they are getting.

For companies and teams the proposition has been less clear. A team is more than a collection of individuals, and so we want to figure out what more we can offer to teams besides a bundle of individual subscriptions.

We have a list of ideas, but before we start building stuff we want to talk to people, to understand what their needs are, and how we can support companies and dev teams to be more effective at what they do.

If your team is interested in shipping better code faster, if your company wants to get serious about knowledge sharing and effective onboarding, then let’s talk! Send an email to arne@lambdaisland.com.

On the Island

On the blog we wrote about the goog.log gem hidden in the Google Closure library, and spun the result into a library, the latest member of the Lambda Island family of open source projects, lambdaisland/glögi.

Open Source & Community

Besides Glögi we also shipped several improvements to Kaocha and Kaocha-cljs. This work was funded by Nextjournal. They are making a really cool Notebook product, and have support for Clojure and ClojureScript. If you’re doing any sort of data science you should check that out.

A newcomer to the Clojure scene Eleven asked us to build a Datomic driver for Metabase. The result is lambdaisland/metabase-datomic. I made a quick video to demonstrate what you can do with it.

We’ve also been busy organizing Heart of Clojure, a brand new Clojure conference in the heart of Europe. It’s coming really close now, less than a month to go, and we are extremely excited to welcome people to the lovely city of Leuven for a weekend of great talks and fun activities!

Finally I wrote some code to Generate Reflection-free Wrappers for Java Classes. It’s not released as a library (yet), instead I shared the code on ClojureVerse as a sort of pre-release, to gather feedback. If you regularly use Java classes and libraries then give it a spin and let me know what you think!

Around the ClojureVerse

Some of you have asked what’s been up with the clojurians log. As I wrote about in April we had some issues, which led me to seek help and work towards a relaunch on brand new infrastructure.

Dorab and Rahul came forward and have been working on this since. You can find their work under clojureverse/nebula.

We have most of the hard stuff figured out and are working towards a relaunch Soon™. We’re still logging in the meanwhile. There has also been renewed interest in improving the app that serves up the logs, so maybe we’ll see some improvements there as well.

Meanwhile I should mention that clojurians-zulip is also mirroring what’s happening on Clojurians Slack, so if you want to dig through some of that history you can also find it on Zulip.

Finally a shout-out to Scicloj! A grassroots initiative to bundle forces and improve Clojure’s Scientific Computing ecosystem. They have been running an on-line meetup with some interesting guests, and are looking for people to join the organizing team.

Have a great summer!

I hope by now you agree we haven’t been sitting still. And, spoiler alert, there’s a new Lambda Island episode in the works which should be out before Heart of Clojure, covering a frequently misunderstood part of the language, the for macro.

Meanwhile I’d love to hear from you! Just reply to this email or send an email to arne@lambdaisland.com.

Keep shining,

Arne