Q3 2020 Funding Announcement

By Daniel Compton

Clojurists Together is happy to announce that for Q3 of 2020 (mid-August-mid-November) we are funding four projects:

This is the first full funding round run under the Clojurists Together Foundation. It’s taken us a little bit longer to get up and running this time, but future rounds should be much quicker.

clj-kondo/babashka/sci

What are you wanting to achieve with this funding?

clj-kondo

High priority issues in clj-kondo are usually fixed very fast: in most cases they are fixed and released within weeks. But there are several important enhancements that have been in the backlog for a while. I have curated a list of these issues and labeled them “clj-together”. They are prioritized in order of importance on the project board: https://github.com/borkdude/clj-kondo/projects/1?card_filter_query=label%3Aclj-together (see medium priority column).

A couple of examples:

Babashka / Small Clojure Interpreter

Why is this project important to the Clojure community?

Clj-kondo is a Clojure linter that is used by a wide variety of individual users and companies (https://github.com/borkdude/clj-kondo/blob/master/doc/companies.md).

Babashka is a scripting environment that can execute a significant subset of JVM Clojure programs with instant startup. It is used by a individual users and companies (https://github.com/borkdude/babashka/issues/254). It is currently my project with the most stars on Github.

Sci is the Clojure interpreter powering babashka and several other projects:

Datahike

What are you wanting to achieve with this funding?

The following requested features can be added with the help of the funding:

Why is this project important to the Clojure community?

Within the Clojure Datalog database world Datahike provides a persistent open source solution for medium-sized projects with a relatively small and extensible code base. It supports a variety of persistent storages like JDBC or Redis. Additionally Datahike supports parts of the well-known Datomic API to better adapt to its functionality.

By adding ClojureScript support in the future, Datahike goes beyond the backend market with a vision of a distributed cross-platform system environment that speaks Datalog everywhere. With two commercial projects in progress, Datahike becomes more battle-tested in production environments.

The core team now consists of five people contributing to the core libraries with more people from the community building useful extensions like for example a RocksDB store, a console for database interaction, or tutorials.

Malli

What are you wanting to achieve with this funding?

Malli is pre-alpha, 90% ready for the community. Due to private and business reasons, I haven’t had enough extra time to lead out a robust stable version. With funding, I would have time to:

  1. get a stable release out! lot’s of small and some bigger design decisions, tracked via metosin/malli#116

  2. help early adopters (users and libraries like reitit, regal, aave and gungnir) to upgrade to use the initial version

After the release, would work on the following:

  1. finalize sequence schemas, https://github.com/metosin/malli/pull/187

  2. enhance developer tooling:

  1. implement pluggable schema inference

  2. parsers

Why is this project important to the Clojure community?

Clojure is a data-oriented language and we should have a solid fully data-driven schema library too! Besides validation and value transformations, we should be able transform, persist, generate and infer schemas just like normal data. Malli tries to be develop-friendly library to companion to other data-driven libs like EQL, Bidi, HoneySQL, Hiccup, Integrant, Reagent and Reitit.

Malli has an open development model, design decisions are discussed in slack (#malli) and in GitHub issues. Not a top goal, but eventually, Malli should be spec-compatible.

Despite being pre-alpha, malli has 21 contributors, 391 stars on github and 54k+ downloads on Clojars.

There is more background on my ClojureD talk and slides.

Practicalli

What are you wanting to achieve with this funding?

Create high quality video tutorials to help spread awareness of Clojure to a wider developer audience. Use selective content from the books to promote Clojure via articles on channels such as DZone, InfoQ, etc.

1) Practicalli Clojure

Extend the existing content with high quality video tutorials of REPL driven development. Video tutorials will cover Clojure CLI, tools.deps, community tools (20+ tools in practicalli/clojure-deps.edn including kaocha, clj-new, depstar, depot, clj-kondo) unit test runners, test.check and continuous integration.

2) Practicalli Clojure WebApps

Extending the content on server-side webapps using Clojure CLI and tools.deps projects which already covers ring/compojure apps with unit tests, clojure.spec specifications all run through CircleCI continuous integration and deployed to the Cloud. Adding Reitit, Duct, Juxt Edge and pedestal based projects which include further examples of component lifecycle management (mount, component, integrant). Data stores currently used are H2 and PostgreSQL and will be extended with Datomic and Crux and their associated security & access management.

3) Practicall ClojureScript

Provide clear and up to date guides on ClojureScript development with Reagent and Re-frame, using figwheel-main and shadow-cljs. Include video tutorials on using CIDER and Calva with these projects for highly interactive development experience. To extend with Fulcro if time allows.

Funding will also provide more time for deeper subjects on the weekly live broadcast I am currently working on.

All content is freely available under a Creative Commons license. Code examples and projects will be available via the Practicalli GitHub organization and website.

Why is this project important to the Clojure community?

Helping the community to grow by providing quality content for people to learn, share and help others more readily discover the joy of Clojure.