Meetup on Monday: Intro to Biff

I wasn’t planning to send an update this week, but I’ve been invited to present at a meetup and I just realized that it’ll occur before I was planning to send the next email. So here’s the announcement, in time for you to actually attend if you so desire:

Intro to Biff: a new full-stack web framework for Clojure

Biff is designed to make web development with Clojure fast and easy, especially for early stage startups and hobby projects. We'll discuss the "what," "why" and "how" of Biff, and we'll go over how you can try it out in your next side project. We'll also talk a bit about the long-term vision for Biff.

We’re also gonna have a chill presentation on category theory from another Clojure-Provo member tomorrow evening: Category Theory in Clojure

Besides that, we’ve been designing a major update for Findka. Here’s a snippet from the first draft of our wireframes (shout out to Balsamiq, a wonderful app which I used for the first time yesterday):

(I’ve copied Twitter for a lot of the design.) Since Findka was launched, the main focus has always been the recommendation algorithm. With this update, we’re experimenting with switching the focus to social networking. The algorithm will still be there of course, and it’ll remain a core value prop in the long term. However we have a hunch that this’ll work better for getting started. (Either way, we were planning to do social networking eventually).

If this experiment works out, we may be in the market for a dedicated frontend dev (CLJS of course). Stay tuned. Our current level of funding (savings) means we’re only competitive on the part-time student job market (if you’re in that market, send me an email!). But a seed round could be on the horizon.

While we get our wireframes figured out, I’ll be giving Biff a facelift in the sysadmin department. I’m starting to learn Terraform, and I need to start using workers in Findka (training the algorithm on the same machine as the web server is no longer an option, sadly). Maybe we’ll even get zero-downtime blue/green deploys.