ClojureBridge aims to increase diversity within the Clojure community by offering free, beginner-friendly Clojure programming workshops for women. On March 13-14, 2015 we held a ClojureBridge event at the Rackspace office in Austin, TX. It was put on by an amazing group of organizers to foster the adoption of Clojure by women in technology.
The People
The students learned from some very experienced Clojurists. People who are coding in Clojure day in and day out at their jobs. Everyone there was either passionate about learning or teaching. It was quite inspiring to be a part of it.
Bridget Hillyer was joined by Nola Stowe and Katherine Fellows in teaching the workshop, along with many teaching assistants. In 2014, some people in the Clojure community were bothered by the lack of diversity, so got together to form ClojureBridge. Bridget was one of those people and since then, they’ve had workshops around the globe in Austin, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Brisbane, Australia, Edinburgh, and Scotland.
The Friday evening was an install fest to make sure all of the students had their Clojure environments setup properly. The following Saturday was spent learning the fundamentals of Clojure. By the end of workshop, I think everyone had a good grasp on it. At the end of the day we handed out some swag and most of the people headed to Pinballz Arcade in Austin for more fun.
The Programming Language
Clojure is a dynamic programming language that targets the Java Virtual Machine. It is designed to be a general-purpose language, combining the approachability and interactive development of a scripting language with an efficient and robust infrastructure for multithreaded programming. And it’s a heckuva lot of fun. :)
Coda
I was happy to host this event at the Rackspace office in Austin, TX. It’s not often you get a chance to be part of something like this so I jumped at the opportunity to help. I think everybody got a lot out of the workshop and will hopefully continue to learn.