How to stick with your projects, even when they're janky - Wilkerson

Jeaye Wilkerson shares practical philosophies and development practices for maintaining long-running projects, drawing from his decade-long experience building the jank programming language.

How can I stick with my project? Are rewrites bad? How do I get the community involved? What are some development practices which can make life saner in a long-running project? In this talk, we'll discuss answers to each of these questions. We'll cover my experience building jank, the native Clojure dialect, for over a decade. We'll also look forward, at the next decade of jank development. You'll leave this talk equipped with some practical philosophies to help you finish your projects and hopefully some inspiration to check out jank. Biography Jeaye is the creator of the jank programming language, a Clojure dialect on LLVM with seamless C++ interop. Jeaye has a background in C++ systems programming, focusing on games and game engines. After over a decade in game development, he's focused on building tools to make native programming saner. Recorded Nov 14, 2025 at Clojure/Conj 2025 in Charlotte, NC.