Last month marked the five year anniversary of Lambda Island. Five years since I quit my job, built a video platform, and figured out how to put together tutorial videos. It’s been quite a ride. All this time I’ve been fortunate to be part of the Clojure community, to watch it grow and evolve, and to help individuals and companies to navigate these waters.

I learned some hard lessons along the way. Like how hard it is to bootstrap an educational content business catering to a niche audience, or how lonely and stressful it can be in business to go it alone.

And with these lessons came changes. I started doing more consulting work again. To some extent it was a necessity, but it also provided me with an opportunity to get involved with many Clojure projects out there in the wild. To work with talented individuals, to learn what amazing things people were doing, and to help shape these companies, products, and the greater narrative around Clojure as a technology and community.

Out of this work grew many open source libraries and tools, like Kaocha, Regal, Glögi and Corgi, which became part of the Lambda Island brand, and indispensible items in people’s toolbelts.

But I was still going it alone, and I didn’t like that, so in 2019, Gaiwan was born, a bona fide Clojure shop, and slowly but surely I started putting together a team. Fast forward to today. We are now a team of 6, spread around the globe, working with amazing clients like Nextjournal, Eleven, Pitch, IT Revolution, and A-Knowledge.

We’ve been busy! And not just with client work. We’ve continued to grow and improve our open source offerings. We’re still running ClojureVerse and Clojurians-log for the community. Our blog has gotten regular updates. We’ve reached a lot of people on YouTube during the Advent of Code, and we even organized a conference, Heart of Clojure.

What we haven’t been doing is posting new video content to Lambda Island. I could say that with everything else happening it has been nearly impossible for me to carve out the time to work on new episodes. That’s not wrong, but the real issue is that I burned out on making them. I would easily spend a full week on a 15 minute episode, slaving over the script, agonizing over the details, and meticulously editing the final result. Then it would go live and…crickets. Freebies would maybe get a few comments on Reddit and a hundred views. Paywalled episodes would get a few dozen. Neither would really bring in new revenue, and I’d be scrambling afterwards to catch up with client commitments.

In hindsight it was a pretty toxic feedback loop. I suffered under my own perfectionism, and with that continued to set the bar high for each subsequent episode.

But this isn’t a story of doom and gloom. Instead it’s one of necessary change. We’re a team now, and everyone on the team is excited to help plot the future of Lambda Island. We don’t know exactly where we’ll end up, but we know the general direction we’re setting out in.

One thing that is clear is that Lambda Island is going to start looking and sounding a bit different. Before, Lambda Island was very much my voice, literally and figuratively. One person’s style of writing, level of experience, and view on technology. Going forward we are going to be a multitude of voices. The first place you are going to notice this is on this blog, where both Ariel and Alys have already started publishing some articles of their own.

Meanwhile Felipe—with help from Ariel—has been hard at work behind the scenes to give the site a major upgrade, the biggest overhaul the site has seen since we launched in 2016. The result should look and feel much more fresh and modern, be faster, more responsive and accessible, and allow for better attribution of authors.

We also know that we want to put more effort into fostering a vibrant community around Lambda Island. One that values curiosity, creativity, and exploration; and where beginners can feel welcome and supported. We set up a Lambda Island community on Discord and started inviting a few dozen individuals while we set things up and get a feel for the place. We’ll soon be sending out more invites, starting with Lambda Island subscribers and to our open source supporters on Open Collective. The whole Gaiwan team hangs out there as well, and so going forward this will be the best way to get in touch with us and get involved in conversations. Don’t be a stranger!

As for video content… we don’t know yet. The most likely scenario is that you are going to start seeing more uncut and unscripted content, like the Advent of Code videos, instead of the highly condensed and polished episodes from before. Unfortunately Pascal’s shorter letter applies here as well… I would have made a shorter video, but I did not have the time.

It does seem a lot of people enjoy these uncut videos, bloopers included. You get to really see how someone works in realtime, how they use their tools and think through problems. For a language with a highly idiosyncratic and interactive workflow like Clojure this is invaluable.

Lambda Island is changing. Change can be a little uncomfortable, but it’s a constant of life. With this post I want to pave the way for the rest of the team, so that they can be comfortable making their mark. We’ll talk in more details about some of the things we are up to in upcoming posts. Meanwhile if you’d like to reach out then you can contact me on Discord as Arne#3086. Don’t be a stranger!