Functional Geekery Episode 131 – Martin J. Logan bo46

In this episode I talk with Martin J. Logan. We talk his experience in CTO roles guiding organizations through functional programming transformations, from lessons learned, tips, tools, strategies, how the grassroots level can help, and much more. Our Guest, Martin J. Logan @martinjlogan on Twitter Discount Code from Manning Reminder that as part of last episode Manning has offered listeners of the podcast a permanent 40% discount code, good for any of their products, in all formats. Use code podgeekery20 for your 40% discount. Conference Announcements Elm Conf is going virtual! Taking place July 15th-17th in your home. The Call for Talks is open and early bird registration has started. Find out more at https://2020.elm-conf.com. If you have a conference related to functional programming, me, and I will be happy to announce it. Announcements Some of you have asked how you can Functional Geekery, in that vein, Functional Geekery now has a Patreon Page. If that is one of the ways you would like to show your , you can find out more at https://www.patreon.com/fngeekery. Topics [@1:40] Welcome Martin Erlware Martin on Episode 13 Erlang Camp Lambda Jam 2014 – Design and architecture for actors [Deg for Actor Based Systems blog post)[http://blog.erlware.org/deg-for-actor-based-systems/] Being a CTO and bringing functional programming into organizations Guaranteed Rate William Hill A first attempt on .NET with F# Next attempt using Clojure “My bet was that there are more smart and talented individuals that want to learn functional programming then there are companies smart or brave enough to give it a try” Opening up the organization to be more polyglot Wanting at least one Anchor to teach and mentor the group Why Clojure was good Being on the JVM. “We’re doing Java […] its basically Java, it runs with Java, it interoperates with Java” Lessons learned from the F# going into Clojure Commitment of investing through the slowdown to get faster What helps at at the grassroots to help with a transformation Participation, Mentoring, Someone willing to help work through exercises with people Real projects to work on How to think about limiting the talent pool on the bet for being a functional programming shop How big of a community are you really looking to build Being exciting enough to get people from Cognitect working who worked on Clojure Training and seeding teams Having the light bulb go off and not wanting to leave and have to go back to other languages Small team (4-6 people) with single anchor for about 6 months to build a team Allowing those team to go out to seed new teams The fear moves away and people want to learn Clojure ClojureScript being pulled into the front-end browser flows Clojure University Importance of the Install Party to get a high quality development environment setup Clojure Essentials Functional Programming patterns similar to Object Oriented Patterns Doing it again at William Hill with Scala Avoiding the same bad habits in Java Scala community being steeped in Category Theory “Scala will expose you everything you get out of Haskell on the JVM” Streams in Scala Helping to make the ground more fertile for a functional transformation Pointing at other successful organizations Languages on the JVM help Helping find an anchor Working to make it really successful Focus on the business value and minimize the risks “Don’t make it just a learning project but a delivery project as well” As always, a giant Thank You goes to David Belcher for the logo design. 5kr3l