Pre-conj Prep: Anna Pawlicka

Anna Pawlicka's talk at the conj is about Om, David Nolen's project, started in December of 2013. It's essentially a wrapper around Facebook's React. It's a way to define HTML components functionally and has been making quite a splash.

David Nolen's talk at Clojure/West relates Om and React to the history of the GUI. It's the best high-level introduction I can imagine and discusses the ideas that motivated its design. If you watch one video to prepare for this talk, this should be it.

For a good talk about React itself, check out Pete Hunt's talk Be Predictable, Not Correct. He's one of the main contributors to React and has been evangelizing it.

Why it matters

React is significant because it is very different from other Javascript MVC frameworks. It takes a very functional approach instead of object oriented. React makes much easier to reason about the UI. Om has also made waves because David Nolen has shown that using ClojureScript's immutable data structures with React can be faster than Backbone.js (a very popular library) even though immutable data is commonly considered slower than mutable data.

About Anna Pawlicka

Twitter - Github - Blog

Anna Pawlicka recently gave a talk at EuroClojure about Reactive data visualisations with Om. The slides are available (they're not visible in the video).

This post is one of a series called Pre-conj Prep, which originally was published by email. It's all about getting ready for the upcoming Clojure/conj, organized by Cognitect. Conferences are ongoing conversations and explorations. Speakers discuss trends, best practices, and the future by drawing on the rich context built up in past conferences and other media.

That rich context is what Pre-conj Prep is about. I want to enhance everyone's experience at the conj by surfacing that context. With just a little homework, we can be better prepared to understand and enjoy the talks and the hallway conversations, as well as the beautiful venue and city of Washington, DC.

Clojure/conj is a conference organized and hosted by Cognitect. This information is in no way official. It is not sponsored by nor affiliated with Clojure/conj or Cognitect. It is simply me curating and organizing public information about the conference.