We are now two weeks after the biggest #OctAmsClj conference we ever organized, and three full years of Clojure meetups in Amsterdam. It's time to give a written log of what happened that day, then we'll sit back and have a look at the current status of the Clojure community in the Netherlands.

A beautiful Clojure day

Anyone who attended can testify the vibrant enthusiasm pouring out of the rooms during the October Amsterdam Clojure conference. The first full day event ever organized by our group, and the third in the #OctAmsClj series, it attracted 50 people from all over the Netherlands, with someone coming even from over the border, all enjoying the sessions, the hallway chats and the greatly successful [un]conference. The whole crowd that day was composed roughly by two thirds of newcomers, the rest part of it being evenly spread between mid- and highly skilled developers, some of which are truly Clojure professionals.

The Dutch landscape in Clojureland

It was earlier this year that our meetup passed the 100 registered users, which is still steadily growing on a weekly basis. While the show ups are indeed way less than that number, averaging around a dozen each month, it's still a good indication over a stable interest on Clojure from the local community.

Such interest is also coming from the higher education world:

• The Hogeschool Utrech Clojure in the Advanced Programmingcourse
• Tijs van der Strom, researcher at the UvA, presented Clojure to the technology enthusiasts at Devnology

On the commercial side of things, aside to a number of self employed Clojure professionals, at least two companies are notable for heavily leveraging Clojure in their business:

• ADGOJI has a full Clojure stack on the backend to support their Mobile ads optimization
• Vixu provides hosting for the Vix CMS, written entirely in Clojure

Turning Japanese European

This year has arguably blessed the outspread of Clojure in Europe. Indeed, the Old Continent was already hosting a fervent community of Clojurians since the dawn of the language:

• Christophe Grand's blog on Clojure predates v1.0,
• Meikel Brandmeyer has been hand-crafting tools since '09
• the mostly European Overtone is all the rage in any Clojure event
• everyone remembers Lau Jensen and his tutorial-style posts

and the list could go on forever. Still, this year EuroClojure conference maked the quantum leap of the language to the bigger circuit. Even more, it wasn't the only one conference dedicated solely to Clojure: we did our job with #OctAmsClj and ClojureX is upcoming in London. The agenda is definitely getting busier, and it will hopefully boost the widespread adoption of Clojure on this side of the Ocean and ultimately in the Netherlands.