COPIOUS is a user-centered digital experience agency. We build digital products with the user at heart and technology in our bones. We recently moved to a new office and now have a large space to host our TechTalks.

About TechTalks:

COPIOUSLabs TechTalks series meets every other Friday at 1pm at the COPIOUS offices. Our talks span artificial intelligence, new programming languages and techniques, computational linguistics, geographic data processing, systems and software architecture, augmented reality, network security, and more as proposed to the Copious engineering team.

About this talk:

Speaker: Ben Kaplin, Systems & Automation Engineer

Datomic leverages distributed storage systems, functional programming and a radical change in information-system architecture to achieve screaming fast write throughput and elastically scalable reads, all while hewing to the Clojure mantra of simplicity in design and engineering.

In the grand finale to our Databases series, Ben will present on the Datomic architecture; the Datalog query language and wax philosophical about the value of programming models that match our mental models. Join us and learn how to bring time as a first-class concept into your data store.

All are welcome to attend. If you have a talk that you'd like to suggest presenting, please email it to [email protected] along with a brief outline of what you'd like to cover.

Ben Kaplin is a Systems and Automation Engineer at Copious (http://www.copio.us). Come learn about the Datomic architecture and query language.

Kevin sez:

The domain problem is conceptually simple: you provide sets of images and are notified with visual diffs of changes. The motivating use case was regression testing a web data visualization product---taking screenshots is far easier and more comprehensive than unit testing JavaScript + DOM + CSS styling.

The application is about 1300 lines of code, which includes all of the (Clojure-generated) markup and styling.It's built with Clojure, ClojureScript, and Datomic. I'll touch on:

• designing an application around Stuart Sierra's "Reloaded" workflow: http://thinkrelevance.com/blog/2013/06/04/clojure-workflow-reloaded

• basics (and not-so-basics) of the Ring HTTP model

• using Chas Emerick's Friend library to handle web user and API authentication

• deploying/monitoring a Clojure application in (low-stakes) production

• structuring an application around protocols so that service backends (e.g., S3) can be easily swapped between development, staging, and production

If there's anything that seems particularly interesting to you (in the above list or otherwise), please reply to this thread so I can prepare a bit of material.

I'm planning on giving a 20 minute high-level overview of the application, and then opening it up to questions and focussing on whatever topics folks are interested in.