Clojure is my favourite Ruby - Steven Deobald

I'm Steve.

That's me. That's my twitter handle.

I sometimes wear cowboy shirts,

I'm blonde, I'm from Canada.

I'm from a tiny little village in the middle of seriously nowhere.

That's a picture of-- actually, it's right beside the pond I used to play in as a kid.

I'm looking back at my town, so there's nothing there [laughter].

[coughs] There are cowboys.

So this is a website that some friends in Canada sent me this week, which I think is amazing -

farmersonly.com - this is actually the town that I went to university.

These are people looking to marry farmers, or farmers looking to marry farm girls [laughter].

It's pretty sweet. Uh, I'm not a cowboy - I'm a Smug Lisp Weenie.

I'm not a particularly good Smug Lisp Weenie, so uh...

I don't really know what this is.

I did a Google image search for 'Smug Lisp Weenie' and it gave me a cute bunny,

[laughter] and I know you're supposed to include one cute animal slide, so there it is.

I've worked these places.

So I worked at ADX Studio, ThoughtWorks, and DRW Trading - which is in Chicago.

DRW is where I've done all my Clojure so far.

Introducing Clojure into an environment is kind of difficult.

We started with just a t-logger.

It was listening to a really terrible messaging framework called LBM -

which is some UDP, drop all your packets, head loss piece of junk.

So we just had an old application that was written in JRuby

which would connect to this thing, and dump all the messages out to a file.

So we figured, that thing is like 50 lines of Ruby, we'll rewrite it in Clojure.

So we got then 12 lines of Clojure. That was a start.

Then we moved on to market data republisher, which is also boring.

So it basically gets a data-stream from an exchange,

and broadcasts it out to the rest of the companies,

so that not everyone needs to connect to the exchange all at once.

It was a little bit more interesting, because we had to deal with Java Interop and things like that.

It was 300 lines of Clojure.

And then the last thing that I wrote before I left was a web application and service,

so it was basically your standard RESTful web service,

in behind what would normally be kind of a Rails app.

So we were using Compojure and stuff for that.

That was about 2000 lines of Clojure.

It was actually kind of cumbersome, because it was also speaking LBM in addition to HTTP.

Okay, people are tweeting at me, so I'm just going to...

Nokia phones - they're amazing.

So the last thing that was written just as I was leaving,

was our trade capture and positions management system.

So this was an application that we'd taken from

60,000 lines of C#, down to about 5,000 lines of Ruby.

The code samples that people were sending me after I left and joined C42

made it look like it would probably go down to about 3,000 lines of Clojure, which is pretty cool.

So now I work at C42.

I'm their token white guy.

They can only have one until they hire 100 more employees,

according to Indian 'import white people from Canada' laws.

I work on RubyMonk, so I've inherited

a pretty sweet code-base from