Ryan Robitaille
Ryan Robitaille is a career Data / Business Intelligence Engineer. In the last 8 years has taken up a specialty in Enterprise Dashboarding / Data Storytelling / Data UIs. Has long been obsessed with building "creative data tools" that bring complex concepts and information closer to peoples understanding through visuals - rather than the inverse. Clojure nerd since 2018. 22+ years in the field at all levels (from a small consultancy in the Northeast to an Eng / Eng Manager at Facebook, Tesla, others).
@ryrobes
A canvas of flow-based REPLS? Through the looking glass w Data Rabbit: "A System built for Seeing"
In a world full of notebooks and REPLs - why can't "thinking in Clojure" be more akin to a data-aware whiteboard? A free-form place for ideas, iterations, and ultimately the beautiful composition of those ideas into an application / dashboard / digital artwork... Why not break some rules and find out? No matter if you are a beginner or a veteran, in order to understand our programs we need to *see* what is happening with them. Inputs, outputs, visualizations of both code and data - the less that is hidden from us, the more we might discover. Over the years things like Hypercard, Smalltalk, Lighttable, Flow-based Programming, Bret Victor's work have all had some of that "creative, visual tool" DNA in common. How can we work some of these concepts into our own tooling - and what might that look like in a modern Clojure(script) environment? Join me in exploring some of these ideas with Data Rabbit - and how visual environments and high-context interfaces can enhance learning, creativity, and (most importantly) understanding.