"Working With the Machine – A Maker’s Journey into Clojure" by Adam Vermeer

Computers are powerful tools and programming languages help us mould them to our liking. Clojure exemplifies this power very well, and is an attractive language with an enticing ecosystem and community for creative people and 'makers' of all kinds. This talk explores a mechanical engineer's foray into the world of Clojure by taking a 'Maker's approach'. Listeners will see how little code experiments and an ever growing 'scrap pile' can be valuable to the learning process. They will be shown examples of using code as part of the creative process for real-world outputs (think 2D and 3D design), and hear about how to select projects that can be personally fulfilling, fun, and useful. Finally, listeners will see an interactive demo showing how we as programmers can work with the machine and make our code more tangible, which can help a lot with creative thinking, and is just plain fun!