A courageous conference?

In the train to Belgium, I was asking me: What is to be a developer? I’m a remote developer but during the years, my answer to this question has always changed; like when you revisit a city in different times of your life.

With a superficial mindset, people might think that a developer is just a person who write code, and our industry it might push people to think like this.

The conference Hearth of Clojure perhaps was trying to answer this question with a deep perspective. There were different talks from extrimely opposite domains, for example: green-IT, free software communities, music, art, mode, mathematic, esthetic, design and .. Clojure and functional things ! :)

It might be that code isn’t just coding.

Coding is one human activity interconnected with differents domains, people, emotions from different cultures. Coding is also an approach to life, for the good and bad things it brings. Coding is also the art of coding, individual creativity and system thinking, we should not forget this, I see also an opposite trend in our industry, where everyone is replaceable.

I appreciate during some lightning talks, the courage of some people who spoke about often unspoken problems, e.g: depressions in IT, or what is our relationship or how we deal with our body as programmers? Just to mentions some of them.

Time just flowed naturally, it was not hectic. We had enough pauses, after each talk we could share our opinions with others, and we shared a unique room, no parallelism during talks involved :)

All this small details, thanks to the organisation have build a friendly atmosphere. I have also appreciated the fact that we are trying to give an europeean athomsphere and culture to a conference happening in Europe; it might seems a truism, but is not. I think we were not just imitating some others models, which perhaps are great elsewhere but they doesn’t fit in Europe with is own identity. (Btw, this is also why I appreciate Clojure language and community for their courage to be non-conventional with perhaps other models (not only in coding))

I personally had the chance to talk in person with so many great developers, not only from skill level but also from human values: unsophisticated, open and authentic.

We spoke about lot of things and we listened each others with a genuine interest. ( this isn’t always granted, (especially in our tech world))

I will not mention all the names of people I have met and discussed with, because either I will forget some of them and also putting some well known names or stating their X company, create from my perspective a phenomenon like society of spectacle in IT, which i’m not a fun. Allthough, I have expressed my enthusiasm to people I admire for their engagement or ideas. But again, I might have also forgotten some of you there. :)

The Heart of Clojure conference was a real alternative and human warm conference. Perhaps some of us think that free software and or opensource are the same thing, and they are obvious and something well known. Everybody speak about it, and we know its dynamics already, right? :)

In fact, I think lot of people share the same doubts with me about free software and its meaning, suitenable organisation models for individuals and contributors. It is not only about money but how people can feel a value or a meaning with the software they do for helping others. There are lot of open questions, which find different answers in different countries and communities perhaps. Most of them doesn’t have any answer yet in our current systems ( not only clojure). But things are going forward!

The most common error we can do is thinking we known already our world because we have some experience (or we think we have? :) )

We shape the reality and codebases with design patterns or models, but often we persist to much on these models, without having the retrospective moments to doubt about their truth.. Think about objects. :)

Definitely beeing part of Hearth of Clojure was for me such a retrospective event with great resonance, and I’m looking forward to learning, sharing and collaborating with the clojurians out there!