Q1 2020 Survey Results

Thanks so much for your support and feedback in the latest survey. We value your opinions and always take suggestions into account as we make changes from quarter to quarter.

The call for proposals for new projects will close on Wednesday, January 15th, 2019 at 11:59pm PST.

We’ll be funding four projects $9,000 each over three months ($3,000/mo).

Survey Responses

There were 77 respondents to the survey, up from 61 in the last survey. The highlights are presented below.

What areas of Clojure would you like to see improvement in?

The main things our members were interested in:

• Error messages
• Documentation
• Developer experience tools
• Build tooling
• IDE support
• Test tooling
• Linters
• Profilers
• Data analysis/processing frameworks

If you work on any of these kinds of projects, please look at applying for funding.

Are there any particular libraries, tools, or projects that are important to you that you would like to see supported?

• ClojureScript compiler
• CIDER + orchard ecosystem
• Reitit
• clj-kondo
• re-frame
• aleph
• Malli
• Shadow CLJS
• Calva

If you’re a maintainer of any of these projects, please consider applying.

Have you seen any direct benefits from improvements to the projects we have funded?

A sampling of comments:

• Yes, Shadow is great!
• shadow-cljs has seen great improvements and the documentation is pretty great nowadays!
• I haven’t been getting direct benefits.
• Using Cider and clj-http and many other projects with added reliability :)
• Yes, Calva is starting to look very promising!
• Yes, I use Kaocha every day

How would you like us to allocate our funding?

We changed this question this time around to ask what percentage of mature to speculative projects people wanted us to fund.

For company members:

• 10% wanted us to fund 25% mature, 75% speculative
• 60% wanted us to fund 50% mature, 50% speculative
• 30% wanted us to fund 75% mature, 25% speculative

For developer members:

• 6% wanted us to fund 25% mature, 75% speculative
• 55% wanted us to fund 50% mature, 50% speculative
• 38% wanted us to fund 75% mature, 25% speculative
• 1% wanted us to fund 100% mature, 0% speculative

What are we doing well, what could we be doing better?

Doing well:

• Consistency in quality of communication
• Nothing to criticise. Maybe sometimes you don’t fund projects I’m interested in, but at other times you do, which is fine. Just keep doing what you’re doing!
• Supporting projects makes them also more well known, especially speculative projects, but also add reliability to older projects.
• Keeping a transparent, continuous process of growth and development; choosing projects which are actually important; communicating the progress; growing steadily.

Could do better:

• Recurring sponsorships for certain projects (eg cider)
• If there were a way to give support by other means than money.
• More transparent communication about how projects were chosen. Blog posts or some other requirements about the project work that was done. I feel like to people that are unfamiliar with the project it is very difficult to understand what was actually done.
• for some mature projects to have semi-longer support
• Get more companies involved, having more ready-made answers for “why should we participate” to help the devs that are not that inclined to create their own story around this.

Stay tuned for some more exciting announcements about Clojurists Together coming soon.

Thanks!