Recently I was working on a history page for CIDER and I realized that this month marks 6 years since the first release under my stewardship of the project - namely 0.1.8.1 I haven’t had much time for writing recently between “Heart of Clojure”, lots of work at my day job, lots of work on CIDER and its Orchard, and preparing for the upcoming “Clojure/south” conference, but I decided that I should jot down a few thoughts about this small anniversary.

Looking back at those 6 years I’m genuinely amazed at how far the project went and its impact on the Clojure ecosystem in general. It’s amusing that I started my tenure at the helm of CIDER with the modest ambition to build a great Clojure plugin for Emacs and down the road I’ve switched to the much more ambitious goal of developing a robust common foundation for Clojure development tools.2 I’ve yet to achieve any of those goals, and I might never manage to do so, but it has been one fun, wild, stressful and very educational ride for me.

I’d like to take moment to thank everyone who supported CIDER and friends, to everyone who contributed to the projects, to everyone who used the projects. You’re awesome and CIDER, nREPL and the rest of the Orchard wouldn’t be the same without you! Your help, support, positive energy and general greatness have kept me and the projects going all this time. It’s truly an honor and a privilege to be part of the awesome Clojure community!

How far can CIDER and CIDER’s Orchard go? Well, I guess sky is the limit, right? I’ll be speaking on this subject later this week at “Clojure/south” and I really hope to meet some of you there!

Here’s to the next 6 years! Cheers!

  1. Technically speaking, it was still nrepl.el back then. ↩

  2. CIDER’s Orchard. ↩