Pre-West Interview: Tyler Tallman

Talk: Composable Healthcare

Tyler Tallman's talk at Clojure/West is about how to model complex problems in Clojure.

Background

Medical care is incredibly complex, and is only getting worse. Most medical record software is like a basic CRUD app. It stores the information the doctor puts in and displays it when asked. But as the amount of information increases, something more needs to happen. How can the computer system support the doctor making ever more complex decisions? How can it support the host of medical professionals that provide care? And what role can Clojure play in that process?

I don't have any background information for this one. But I know Tyler personally and this is a fascinating story of rules engines, complex data formats, visualizations, and composable abstractions.

About Tyler Tallman

GitHub - Twitter

This interview was graciously conducted by Nola Stowe. She's a programmer, the co-founder of DevChix, and a prolific teacher. She recently ran ClojureBridge Austin. Please shout out to her and say thanks!

Introduction

Tyler Tallman is the next interview participant. He is giving a talk at Clojure/West about Clojure to do real-time communication in the healthcare industry. The background to his talk is available, if you like.

Interview with Tyler Tallman

Nola: How did you get into Clojure?

Tyler: I had read m uch about it before, but Stephan Richter's demonstration of Clojure on app engine led me to binge listen to every Rich Hickey talk I could find. He had me at "epochal time model".

Nola: What languages did you do before Clojure?

Tyler: C++ python and a bit of php

Nola: What advice do you have for beginner Clojure programmers?

Tyler: Read lots of other peoples code and take the time to make at least one design as simple as you possibly can.

Nola: What is your tooling like? emacs or vim or ?

Tyler: I started on vim moved to emacs for it's clojure support and now mostly use Cursive.

Nola: You mention React in your talk description, are you using it in ClojureScript? What flavor of React are you using? (ie Om, Reagent, etc)

Tyler: We use a modified version of Quiescent. I think all the React from Clojure work will eventually grow together into a set of functions and a common macro used to generate the react class directly.

Nola: How would you use Clojure to defeat the kobayashi maru?

Tyler: Persistent data structures of course

Nola: Thanks for the interview. It was very informative.