Q2 2023 Call for Proposals plus April Survey Results

Call for Proposals

Clojurists Together is pleased to announce that we are opening our Q2 2023 funding round for Clojure Open Source Projects. Applications are open until the 24th of April 2023. Apply today!

We will be awarding a total of $44,000 USD for 8 projects – 4 projects at $2,000 each and 4 projects at $9,000 each. The $2k funding tier is for experimental projects or smaller proposals, whereas the $9k tier is for those that are more established. Projects generally run 3 months, however, the $9K projects can run between 3 and 12 months as needed. We expect projects to start for this round between May 1 and June 1, 2023.

In early April, we surveyed our members - to find out what types of initiatives they would like us to focus on for this round of funding. Their responses are summarized below. Thanks as always – it is extremely helpful in ensuring that the community is a vital source of input.

If you work on a Clojure open source project, especially one mentioned as a focus area for our members, please consider applying.

Survey Responses

As usual, we were inundated with responses to our April 2023 survey.

Which platforms do you target?

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

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

What areas of the Clojure and ClojureScript ecosystem need support?

Growing and Supporting New and Beginning Developers

• Growing the userbase and general advocacy to attract new talent
• Getting started documentation and tutorials that include materials that help guide beginners
• Onboarding support for non-senior developers
• Example projects, both on the JVM (Clojure) and on Browsers (ClojureScript)
• Guides on the fundamentals of Java SDK, like Threads, Threadpools, IO (streams, readers, files)

Developer Tooling and Documentation

• Events handling, interconnect, cross-platform support
• Better integration of ClojureScript and JS land. Using JS libs and tools often feel rough around the edges, impacting the developer experience negatively
• I love using Clojure CLI, CIDER, shadow-cljs, and a few other developer tools but getting everything to work together correctly and to gracefully degrade is a constant source of pain and a time sink. I’d love to see some more love and attention paid to making the holistic experience and setup easier, better documented, and less error-prone.
• Easier integration with Java and JS, especially interaction with object-oriented code; machine learning, statistics, time series data
• Tools that make initial setup easier
• A larger set of tooling and ecosystem around Node.js could also be very useful for a lot of projects.
• Vega /vega-lite renderer
• Additional work on the Neanderthal framework (bayesian inference, GAM models)
• Libraries still have a tendency to fall into an unmaintained state, with even simple things like updating dependencies failing to be done.
• A larger set of tooling and ecosystem around Node.js

What areas of the Clojure and ClojureScript ecosystem are strong?

• Great community 💯 We are a stable and wonderful community, building fun projects.
• Stability. Simplicity. Getting things done.
• Build tooling and linting is getting very solid.
• Quality of the support available on Slack is insane.
• The reliability. I have a server I built for a financial services client 6 or 7 years ago and it has run with basically no downtime in that period.
• The language excels at being compact and supports functional style while allowing one to dip into imperative programming when needed.
• The core libraries are strong, and the Clojure build tooling is pretty strong now.

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

aleph
Babashka
buddy
CIDER
clj-kondo
Clojure-LSP
HoneySQL
http-kit
jdbc.next
Malli
next.jdbc
nrepl
pathom
Reagent
re-frame
Reitit
Ring
shadow-cljs

What would you like to be different in the Clojure community in the next 12 months?

Growth of the Community was the focus of many comments:

• Increased user growth.
• I’d like to see more newcomers for the long-term health of Clojure.
• More startups and projects that use Clojure and speak openly about it.
• More professional job opportunities and information about demanding clojure skills amd knowledge.
• Maybe funding “internships” / “apprenticeships”, or “clojure summer of code” type things (for newbies to clojure) (Clojure Camp would be willing to supply the mentorship and structure), work that grows clojure outside of where it currently reaches
• Better materials and tools for beginners to start using Clojure to build applications
• I wish there would be an excellent getting started webapp template :)
• Growth of the community in general. An additional significant commercial sponsor.
• I’d like to see more newcomers for the long-term health of Clojure.
• More startups and projects that use Clojure and speak openly about it.
• More professional job opportunities and information about demanding Clojure skills and knowledge.