Learning Clojure: Part 9

This week I attended Software Craftsmanship 2012 at Bletchley Park.

I had a fantastic time! Its a completely hands on event and I spent both the morning and afternoon sessions pairing in Clojure.

There was a pathfinding algorithm contest in which we picked up most of our points by not making illegal moves, and I'm sure I learnt more about Clojure than I did about pathfinding. The session was built on Matt Wynne's Robot Tournament from Software Craftsmanship 2010. Although the upload mechanism limited the robots to no more than about a megabyte (less than the size of the Clojure jar needed by our robot), my pairing partner managed to persuade the organisers to add the jar to their server.

In the afternoon I attended a session on the Enigma Machine. It is an interesting machine to model and seems to lend itself well to Clojure. Although the end of the session arrived while our machine had but a single rotor, I intend(!) to finish off the solution.

Overall the day was brilliant. Plenty of diverse people (including a good number of Clojurians), fun sessions with lots to sink one's metaphorical teeth into, a tasty hog roast and an auction to round off the day. Thanks to Jason Gorman and all the people at Bletchley Park!