reClojure 2025

I went to my first Clojure conference yesterday — my first tech conference since Rails Conf 2012. It was reClojure in London, and it made me think.

Talks were generally really good, but a couple landed particularly well.

Replicant creator Christian Johansen’s talk hit close to home: I’m building Parts, and he demoed what UI development (with Replicant) can look like when one takes functional programming seriously¹. He also introduced a couple of interesting tools, including Portfolio, a Storybook-like tool for Clojure, letting you test components visually and separately from each other.

I can’t use Replicant or Portfolio yet, as Parts is deep in the React ecosystem with React Flow holding the whole thing together, but the talk was a needed reminder: modern UI doesn’t have to mean React and its complexities. Simplicity and testability can win.

Another talk I liked was on brain/computer interfaces, by Lorelai Lyons, who cracked open a field that felt like sci-fi to me via an impressive growth mindset. “You can just do things”, was my takeaway, “and share what you do, and be open about what you don’t know, and be excited about it all”. I wasn’t expecting to leave thinking about brain/computer interfaces, but Lorelai’s talk put them on my radar. She made the field feel accessible, like something weird and wonderful I could just start engaging with. That felt rare and freeing!

On the way home from the conference, I made this post on my socials:

A day at #reClojure, listening to inspiring talks & talking to inspiring nerds, made me realise just how burnt out I am on the whole field of CRUD-adjacent webdev. I feel I need some kind of reset, to start working on more challenging, more meaningful problems 🤔

This wasn’t nothing. Everyone who gave talks (or just showed up) brought this infectious kind of energy, the energy of people who care about their work, deeply. It made me realise that I need a lot more of this energy in my own life.

I’ve been circling this particular kind of burnout for a few years now, trying not to name it. Attending reClojure wasn’t a magic fix for all my problems, but it nudged me in what feels like a positive direction. Maybe that’s the start of doing some things differently.