Q4 2018 Survey Results and Call For Proposals

By Rachel Magruder

We’ve recently finished our fourth round of surveys on our members to better understand the community’s needs. We’re posting this feedback so that they can see the aggregate results, and to give open source projects more information when applying for the Q4 2018 Clojurists Together funding round (closing on the 9th of October).

Survey Responses

There were 56 respondents to the survey, up from 49 in the last survey. The highlights are presented below.

Which Clojure dialects do you regularly use?

Which platforms do you target?

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

The main things people were interested in: error messages (58%), documentation (47%), build tools (42%), developer experience tools (33%), IDE support (31%), test tooling (26%), and linters (26%). Tools and documentation targeting beginners to Clojure or to programming in general were mentioned by quite a few people.

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

Shadow CLJS, Figwheel, CIDER, Rum, Datascript, Reagent, Protorepl, Neanderthal, LightTable, Leiningen, Fulcro, Expound, and Eastwood were all mentioned several times.

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

About half of the respondents to this question had seen direct benefits, and half hadn’t. One note that came up a few times was that some people had found it hard to update CIDER as they were stuck on older versions of Emacs.

How would you like us to allocate our funding?

77% - Fund a mix of established projects and speculative projects 20% - Only fund established projects that have already had some success 3% - Only fund speculative projects

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

Doing well:

Could do better:

We’ve just started the process of redesigning the Clojurists Together site. We’ve already got a new logo (thanks to Jacek Schæ) and are working on improving the site design. Since hiring an admin assistant last month, we’ve had more time to reach out to different Clojure companies to talk about joining. We’ve also improved the benefits we are offering to members, Filter members and above receive a much more prominent place on the members page, along with a 1-2 sentence blurb. Expect to see more improvements here in the future.

If you’d like to see more companies sponsor Clojurists Together, please reach out to them and encourage them to join.

Call For Proposals

If you are a maintainer of an open source Clojure project, we’d encourage you to consider applying for the Q4 funding round. If you maintain a project that was mentioned either directly, or as one of the survey respondents' focuses, then we’d highly encourage you to consider applying. Applications will close on the 9th of October. If you know of a project that you think would be a good fit for Clojurists Together, please encourage them to apply. If you have any questions or would like any help with your application, please get in touch.