This year I attended the Confitura conference for the first time. Many posts have been written on it, so I’ll focus on one (but not the only) presentation that I found particularly worthwhile.

Clojure…

I started my day with talk on Clojure as HTML Templating Language by Łukasz Baran. Despite all the advocacy for Clojure that I do, I was surprised to find this presentation in the agenda – specialized, concrete talk instead of a generic “Clojure is awesome! Go use it!”. Another surprise came from the fact that someone in Poland was serious about using it commercially. I suspect I wasn’t the only surprised person there, as there were a few dozen people in the room and only few of them used Clojure or even functional programming.

Łukasz showed how you can use Clojure for HTML templating in Java projects. He described a team which moved from Velocity to Clojure ca. 2009. They created a DSL for HTML similar to Hiccup (before Hiccup became popular), and went a step further implementing a component library and other automations. From the very beginning they assumed it would be called from Java, so they wrote a loosely coupled component that you can plug in to Spring. Finally, they’ve been using it in production for years and are very happy with it.

Why do this, and why this way? Compared to Velocity, Clojure is very fast, concise, powerful and productive. It has gentle learning curve (when narrowed down to DSL). It was much easier to introduce Clojure in a big enterprise Java shop this way than to write purely Clojure projects from scratch (this may be a good approach in general, by the way).

Personally, I really liked it that this presentation was limited to such a boring, but concrete area. Everyone knows something about writing view layers in Java webapps. Everyone knows pains of JSP (Velocity & other frameworks or not). This presentation showed that it can be done differently and the pain points can be mitigated. It also was a great proof that Clojure has its place and is no academic black magic. In other words, advocacy done right: Instead of showing off the new tool from an ivory tower, demonstrate how it can solve a concrete everyday problem.

… and the Rest

That was not the only good thing at this Confitura. In fact, I really enjoyed most of the talks I saw there.

Paweł Wrzeszcz gave a very good presentation on How to work remotely and don’t go crazy. He showed many good habits for teams and individuals that let you live a healthy life in a healthy project. Though my personal conclusion is that even if you do everything right as an individual, team culture can kill and sometimes the only way out is… out.

I saw two talks on testing, by Jacek Kiljański and Tomek Kaczanowski. Jacek seemed to be a young passionate who believes in everything he says, but also had a well prepared presentation on Clean Tests with clear message and good examples. The following talk by Tomek was quite different – felt more like a rational, sometimes skeptical veteran sharing war stories. It may be due to my tiredness or combination of high temperature and low oxygen, but I did not find this presentation as sharp and clear as the previuous one. Part of the story might be that Jacek stole Tomek’s thunder and there was much overlap.

After a break I went to Maciek Próchniak’s talk on Scala, CQRS and Event Sourcing, but I was rather disappointed. It was pretty chaotic and shallow. I suspect that if you had a slight idea of CQRS and ES, you could not learn much new – even though the problem at hand had some depth that could be discussed in more detail. On the the hand, it assumed too much of the listener to be suitable for a beginner.

Then I saw Sławek Sobótka’s presentation about Soft aspects for IT experts. It was centered around Dreyfuss skill acquisition model (again, and even Sławek admitted it’s something that appears a few times at each conference). Still, it managed to offer something new by only treating the model as a framework and an excuse to dive into many interesting aspects of psychology. Very professional, enjoyable and worthwhile.

Our day ended with Wojciech Seliga’s keynote titled How to be awesome at a Java developer job interview. Less of a talk, more of an emotional rant, but most of the time I really agreed with the presenter. I know way too many careless, ignorant people who consider themselves experts and neglect common tools and practices, stopped learning years ago or simply don’t know what they’re doing.

All in all, it was a very good conference. More technical and low-level than 33rd Degree. By no means “worse” or “better”, just different. Felt like a family get-together, rather than a big conference with big names talking about big stuff that put things in perspective or show some trends, but are somewhat detached from our daily work.