Clojure/Conj 2026 Workshops
Table of Contents
Sibling to the Clojure/Conj 2026 overview. The workshop day is Wednesday, September 30 — two three-hour blocks. Program: workshops · full schedule · registration.
1. Wednesday, September 30 — workshop day
1.1. Morning, 9:30 AM – 12:30 PM
- W201AB — Datomic Deep Dive — João Nascimento Mello (Staff SWE, Nubank). Living with production Datomic.
- W201CD — Clojure Camp Coding Jam — Rafal Dittwald (Clojure Camp). Mob session, then pairs.
- W205AB — Babashka: fast native Clojure scripting — Michiel Borkent, Rahul De. Instant-start, batteries-included
bb. - W205CD — Backseat Driver: Calva Tools for AI agents — Peter Strömberg (PEZ, creator of Calva). See below.
1.2. Afternoon, 1:30 PM – 4:30 PM
- W201AB — Fast, Lean, Native Clojure — Adrian Smith. Native libraries + off-heap memory.
- W201CD — Clojure Camp Coding Jam, Part II — Jordan Miller.
- W205ABCD — AI Tools & Practices Showcase — Eric Dallo (Sr. Lead SWE, Nubank). Fast-paced attendee demos of AI dev tools and practices.
2. W205CD Backseat Driver — it maps onto our tooling
Backseat Driver is a Calva (VS Code) extension that hands an AI agent access to Calva's REPL sessions, REPL log, and structural editing — as native tools or an MCP server — plus Calva's multi-user REPL for parallelized agent work.
This is the same pattern www.wal.sh already runs, on the Emacs side: agents eval
through CIDER into one nREPL (127.0.0.1:42527), with a shared multi-agent REPL
on nexus. See Advanced Clojure ("bb nrepl-server so CIDER and Calva can
connect"). We have ~80% of it; the piece worth wiring in is Backseat Driver's
MCP mode — an nREPL-to-MCP bridge exposing 42527 as a first-class agent tool,
retiring the ad-hoc bencode client. Structural-editing-as-a-tool is the one
capability we lack (our agents edit text, not structure).
Related on the talk schedule: Live Systems, Live Thinking: Materializing Production Traces into AI-Assisted REPL Flows (Juliana Prieto, Thu) sits on the same agent-plus-REPL thread.