Clojurists Together funding

Exercism
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I’m very excited to announce that the Clojure track is one of 7 projects to be funded this quarter by Clojurists Together: Clojurists Together | Q1 2023 Funding Announcement

This means for the next 3 months I’ll be able to work on the track full time! I’ve divided the things to be done into these categories:

  1. Expand the track Syllabus by writing more learning exercises
  2. Writing Approaches
  3. Improving automated analysis tooling
  4. Implementing inline evaluation and structural editing/navigation in the online editor
  5. Continuing with Functional February livestreams and extending the series afterwards!

The committee of donors will be receiving periodic progress updates and providing feedback about which features are to be focused on.

Much gratitude to the committee that decided that the Clojure track is a huge value to the community! :confetti_ball:

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Amazing news. Congratulations!! :blue_heart:

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Awesome awesome news! Congratulations :tada: :sparkler:

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This is also a model that hopefully we can learn from and other maintainers can apply for grants for in the same way. Thanks for pioneering it, Bobbi!!

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Do other language communities have organizations like Clojurists Together? It was founded to solve the sustainability problem that arises when people build things in their spare time that come to be relied on heavily, which subsequently become a burden to maintain without compensation.

I’m curious how unique this is.

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Ahh @porkostomus congratulations! This is great news!

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Ruby had Ruby Together which seems similar. It merged with Ruby Central a couple of years back. It has scholarships which are maybe similar?

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Ah nice, I had a feeling that was another idea we “stole” from the Ruby community (RailsBridge, anyone?).

I’d applied twice in the past, and was entirely not surprised or disappointed that they chose to fund other projects. After all, it is explicitly for funding “critical infrastructure”, and well, obviously that was nothing I was doing…

But after the success of v3 and the Clojure syllabus this started to change. I started noticing Exercism being recommended everywhere I looked, including the learning resources page on clojure.org. And when I finally saw the build pages showing the track’s statistics, I realized I had an extremely poor sense of what a major role we play in the programming education landscape. And education… is… critical infrastructure.

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I’ll be stealing this quote for everywhere…

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Also, I didn’t just submit my proposal and hope for the best, despite feeling that the chances of it being accepted were objectively quite high.

I wrote a blog post talking about the improvements being made to the analysis tooling, and made sure to properly publicize it so it would be on the community radar.

It was important that I wrote it using very accessible language, but also to make it sound sufficiently technical so that it would be apparent that I was the right person to execute it.

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