I got introduced to Clojure in an adtech company when I was doing their frontend dev - coffeescript/python in 2013. I was not really a front-ender but more like full stack, however I was super interested in the startup itself, thus I really didn’t care what the language(s) was.
Meanwhile when the realtime systems was completely written in Clojure and I was wrapping most of the front-end work, I jumped into the wagon to write some 3rd party integrations using Cascalog(Hadoop). That was a tough start, grasping everything and dealing with all those arrows and parenthesis at the beginning. I wouldn’t suggest anyone to start from! 
From that moment on, the power, simplicity and effectiveness took me over. However in Netherlands especially in Amsterdam finding a Clojure job wasn’t that easy afterwards. I had to chance to implement another data pipeline using clojure, and then became a Clojure freelancer for a while which did not last for long. Afterwards I needed to stay on the Python side for a while but still doing Big Data / Engineering work.
I was also a speaker at the Dutch Clojure days in 2016, and also planning to do another talk for 2019 with a better story to tell!
Right now, I am the Lead Data Engineer within the AI group of the Fd.nl ( Financial Times of The Netherlands) and we are building projects with ML & AI and I am mostly the guy who builds all the infrastructure, data pipelines, and the tooling around it. I myself the only engineer, the rest of the team is data scientists writing mostly in Python but also currently in the process of learning Clojure!
The first project was Smart Radio https://medium.com/a-tale-of-2-from-data-to-information/serverless-smart-radio-1cabcab8de30 and now we are busy with the Recommender System for the fd.nl. Especially the recommender system is quite a cool project, lots of moving parts, pretty cool tech and there will be also another series to talk to about. Anyways enough chit chat.
I am originally from Istanbul, Turkey and I moved to Netherlands in 2008.
You can find me on internet https://twitter.com/bahadir.cambel or https://bahadir.io or http://linkedin.com/in/bahadircambel
If you have any suggestions for the new starter courses/tutorials that would be great. I have already passed the https://www.braveclojure.com/ Clojure koans. Sad to see 4clojure is gone.
Would be also interested to hear if you are using Clojure for Data Science. We recently bought the book Clojure for Data Science and looks great. We are also using kixi.stats to do some computations for the Recommender systems already!
Thanks and if you have any questions, ping me on Twitter or here! Take care
… And now, i want to recover the fun in my job and I believe that Clojure is the key to it 
