Hi,
I’m Tommi, from Tampere, Finland and I’ve been working professionally with Clojure for the last 5 years. Before that, did 15 years mostly Java, Scala and Enterprise Integration & Architecture Thingies.
Working at Metosin and semi-actively developing our open source libs, currently eager to ship out reitit.
Besides programming, enjoying lovely coffee, beer and spending time with the kids.
Some tea too.
Hi! I’m Brendan from Sydney.
I got introduced to Clojure in 2012 when I started at ICM Consulting, and have been using it pretty much full-time since then.
I’ve dabbled in a few open source projects over the years, including contributing a couple of plugins to the LightTable IDE before it was obvious that that was going no-where.
I had a team with various work colleagues competing in the Clojure Cup in each of it’s 3 events - in the last year we came 3rd with our IKEA visit planner (which unfortunately can’t be found anywhere - we’ll need to fix it up and host it somewhere).
I can be found sometimes at the Sydney Clojure User Group, or playing cricket on a Saturdays.
We talk a lot about Community with a capital C, but all it really is is people, lots of people just like you and me, all bringing their own unique voice to the table. Introducing yourself means people get to know a little more about you, so that you’re no longer a stranger, but a real human sitting on the other side of the screen.
If you’re new here, or you’ve been around for a while but haven’t introduced yourself yet then this is your chance. Tell us your story!
Some ideas of what you can share:
(repeatedly #(rand-nth [
]))
This month in particular you can also anwer: What do you love or hate about the end of year season?
My name is Arne. I mostly did Ruby before discovering Clojure, and I’m absolutely delighted to have found such an elegant, practical language and friendly community.
You may know me from Chestnut or Lambda Island, I also keep this place going together with an awesome team of admins and mods. If you like any of the stuff I’ve done you can support me on Patreon.
I’m from Belgium and live in Berlin, but avoid being here in winter if I can help it. I like the last few weeks of the year because it’s usually a time for me to slow down, take a break, spend time with family, and to reflect on what’s been and dream about what’s to come.
I’m also a (former) juggler, hip-hop artist, poet, sound engineer, hobby cook, and language geek 
Hi there!
I am Aspasia a Clojure developer based in Amsterdam. I am organiser and tutor for the ClojureBridge NL chapter. I got into programming since a little girl, I have tried many programming languages since then and most of my professional experience before was in Java. I am fascinated with the lisp way of thinking and it turns out that it matches my way of thinking too!
For the rest I am an amateur ballet dancer, yogi and painter. I like to learn new things and create new experiences!
I love my secret winter project.
It started on Christmas day in 1981, when, at age 15, I got my first computer: a Commodore VIC-20.
These are the BASIC books + program cassettes! I tore through:
I sat down Christmas morning, plugged in, opened a book…and didn’t get up from my chair until I had worked through the whole thing, days later.
I had never been so compelled by anything that did not sport a pony tail.
Ever since, when the days get short, I feel the urge go larval and hack something fun. Just for me.
Looking back on Github I see these recent winter projects (ok and some fall projects too):
Dec 2016: FJ: Functional Java—the obligatory tiny functional programming library for Java GitHub - Bill/FJ: Functional Java—the obligatory tiny functional programming library for Java.
Nov-Dec 2015: iiqm-clj: Incremental Interquartile Mean using Clojure Finger Trees IQM and Finger Trees by Bill Burcham GitHub - Bill/iiqm-clj: Incremental Interquartile Mean using Clojure Finger Trees
Oct-Nov 2015: hamstar: Hamstar Transforms Hamster (Immutable) Ruby Collections Better GitHub - Bill/hamstar: Hamstar Transforms Hamster (Immutable) Ruby Collections Better
Dec 2012: orchestrated: a minimal Ruby workflow orchestration framework running on delayed_job and active_record GitHub - Bill/orchestrated: a minimal Ruby workflow orchestration framework running on delayed_job and active_record
Nov 2009: wavenub: expose public Google Waves to the Internet (perhaps you’ve heard of it) GitHub - Bill/wavenub: Expose public Google Waves to the Internet (perhaps you've heard of it)
Part of the joy is not rushing into it—and not rushing out of it either. And not having any externally-imposed requirements. There is so much freedom in just making something that makes me happy. Making it in a way that makes me happy. Spending as much or as little time on any particular detail as suits me. No need to convince anyone before, during, or after!
I haven’t decided on the project for this winter. But there is no rush.
Hi,
My name is Daniel Szmulewicz. I was born in Belgium and live in Tel-Aviv.
I have traveled extensively around the world, worked as a journalist and published two novels in France.
I currently operate as a solo entrepreneur, writing apps for a living.
I am the founder and organizer of Clojure Israel, active since January 2013.
I have authored a couple of open source libraries in Ruby, Java and Clojure.
Every project I put in production uses the system library as a foundation, which I continually refine to boost liveness, composability and reach. Due to priorities and time constraints, I am very much aware of lagging behind on the documentation front. Sustainability of open source is a real issue in my experience. I think that initiatives like Clojurists Together are a step in the right direction. I have applied for a funding round in the hope to catch up.
I have just finished drafting a Wiki page describing Raamwerk, a web framework that ships with the system library. Comments are very much welcome.
I’m on Twitter as danielszmu, and my developer blog is here.
Hi,
I’m Sanat from Bangalore, India.
I love learning new languages - I’ve used Ruby before there was Rails. My primary environment though is the Microsoft platform. Linq and lodash were my gateway drugs to functional programming and once I discovered React and then Reagent, there was no going back.
Clojure changed the way I think and I keep coming back to it for inspiration. The community is full of super smart and friendly folks that are always willing to help.
Hope to continue my learning journey here.
I’m @sanatgersappa on twitter.
Hi,
I’m Andrew Zah, from South Carolina but currently living in 세종시, 대한민국 (South Korea).
I’m a self-taught developer. My college degree was unrelated (Media Arts) and I work as an EFL teacher now.
I started with Ruby and Ruby on Rails, and worked with Crystal 
for a while.
I switched over to learning Clojure/FP recently and I find it absolutely amazing. I’m not very good yet, but I enjoy this style of thinking immensely. I’m still working through Clojure for the Brave and True, and Applied Clojure 
will be next. My goal is to become proficient in working with clojure and just learn more about programming in general. I’m still debating about going back for a masters pertaining to CS.
Outside of programming, my hobbies include acoustic recording, playing videogames, and tournament hosting. I hosted a few regional tournaments in South Carolina for Super Smash Bros. Melee. I also explore a lot in Korea.
Github: https://github.com/azah - mostly APIs
Website: https://andrewzah.com although it’s currently down. I’m rewriting it with Compojure/Hiccup 
Hi Clojurist,
I am Burin Choomnuan, originally Thailand currently living/working in Washington DC, US.
I started learning Clojure from around end of 2015. My background is Java, Ruby, and many others. I found Clojure when I first try to setup my Emacs config after watching EmacsRocks episodes. Most of the examples are in Clojure so that how I got started.
I started with learning Emacs for about 3 months (coming from Vim) and then I gradually started with Clojure and I was hook. Since then I have built couple of personal projects and many of small command line application in Clojure. As I have Java background it comes in very handy when I have to get down to code in Java when I absolutely have to.
I am a big fan of automation, so you may see many of my personal Github projects around that topics.
Clojure gives me joy and it fits well in my brain compare to other programming languages.
For me the best development environment is Emacs/Clojure + REPL.
Best,
Github: github.com/agilecreativity
Twitter: @agilecreativity
Web: choomnuan.com
Hi everyone,
I’m Andrew Oberstar from Minnesota in the US. My experience is mostly on the JVM: lots of Java, a good amount of Groovy, and then I started dabbling in Scala and Clojure. Clojure’s the one that stuck (for hobby work) and I’ve been poking around with it for the last few years. My day job is a very stodgy corporate environment (Java based), so my Clojure work is all in my spare time. I’ve really enjoyed the numerous Rich Hickey talks and Clojure books. This language and community really speak to the ideas that I feel are most important (for the kinds of programs I enjoy working on).
I’m easily distracted from building applications by tooling issues, so my open source projects tend to be in that space. I’ve been building Gradle plugins for many years and finally have made progress (with the other devs) on one for Clojure (gradle-clojure). It’s still in it’s early days, but is functional enough for basic Clojure development.
Hello!
My name is Jason Sich from Kalamazoo, MI in the US. I’ve done a lot of random things from software development for aerospace to collaborative drawing apps for the iPad. Currently my day job involves working on a large Rails app. I’ve been using Clojure/ClojureScript casually for the past 2 years. My interest came about after getting tired of working with complex classes, inheritance, types and architecture in .NET. I spent awhile doing JavaScript & NodeJS and eventually found Clojure/ClojureScript after working in React for a bit. I was hooked after listening to a few Rich Hickey & David Nolen talks. I’ve been mostly focused on web clients and have been building out a few side projects using re-frame.
Hello, my name is Børge from Norway!
I’ve been using Clojure since 2014, mainly for web stuff. I’ve been using a lot of other languages as well (PHP, Python, Java, C#, and JavaScript mainly), but after discovering Clojure it has been my go-to language when starting a new project.
My main interests outside of programming is music and fishing.
My latest project was a voice chat for language learners using WebRTC, but I gave up on it due to the amount of users it would have needed to be useful. The unfinished code can be found on github for those that are interested: backend-repo, frontend-repo
I sometimes tweet.
Hi, I’m Chris from Germany.
I’ve been writing code since I was a kid, I’m in my early thirties now so that’s about 25 years of programming experience. I love learning new programming languages and have played around with about 60 so far, but I’m only really good (fluent you could say) with a handful of course. Although good might be a bit of an exaggeration, the bad thing about learning so many languages is that it kept me from really mastering the few I actually use
My journey with Clojure started very early when it was still new, maybe a month old but I can’t remember, I played around with it for quite some time and really loved the language, but I mainly develop end user desktop applications and websites, so Java is not something that was usable for me. While there are some great desktop apps written in Java, they are the rare exception since you need a lot of know how to make Java apps look and feel like users expect (I think it’s easier now with JavaFX but I have no experience with that, yet!).
I moved on to JavaScript / node-webkit development (which today is better known as Electron, it’s not exactly a fork but it’s basically the same, the core developer of node-webkit was contracted by Github to create Electron as far as I know). I tried to use ClojureScript but back when it was new it was just a pain to setup projects using ClojureScript, so I moved on to CoffeeScript and really got to like CoffeeScript’s Python-like syntactic whitespace.
When Zach Oakes’ Lightmod came out a month ago, an all-in-one Clojure/ClojureScript IDE, I tried ClojureScript again and this time it finally clicked for me since Lightmod makes it trivially easy to use it, and even takes care of balancing parentheses by using the syntactic whitespace I like so much!
Now I’m fully back on the Clojure(Script) train, having written close to 2k lines of code in it (using Reagent) over the past month, and already published two projects with it, or three if you count my private homepage / blog. I’m still learning of course since I haven’t used Clojure in a long time and wasn’t that good with it back then to begin with, but now with such great tools like Lightmod/Nightlight and Reagent it’s just super fun to work with and learn.
Impressive that you have been programming for so long >.<
I love CoffeeScript and ClojureScript too. I started learning programming with Python and CoffeeScript in 2010, and switched to ClojureScript in late 2015. I made myself a tiny virtual DOM library after using Reagent for a while, would you like to try http://respo.site/ .
Respo looks really cool, I bookmarked the site, I’ll check it out once I’m done learning Reagent & re-frame. Don’t want to do too many things at the same time, I have a tendency to do that and it never works out well 
Yeah my programming life has been quite an adventure starting back on the Amiga 500 with Basic For a while when I was just out of school I thought I’m done with programming, just got bored with it, but Ruby brought me back into it, made programming fun again for me.
From there I went to Objective-C and Smalltalk-80 which Ruby was greatly influenced by. Clojure was the first Lisp I ever tried I think, I checked out Racket, Haskell and Elm after Clojure to learn more about functional programming (I much prefer Clojure though). And somewhere in between Rebol, which was originally based on Scheme so it’s distantly related to Lisps.
Its modern incarnation Red is really cool, it’s a systems programming language but as easy to use as a high level language like Ruby/Python. Basically Rust for mere humans. And has the easiest cross platform native GUI programming I’ve ever seen. GUI hello world? One line: view [button “Say hello” [print “Hello world!”]]. And that compiles to a tiny native .exe for Windows and .app for macOS (the Linux maintainer went AWOL so it doesn’t do GUI on Linux yet). I hope other languages like Clojure adopt that model of GUI programming one day, Rebol & Red show that GUI programming can be made easy and fun and only as complex as you need it to be.
Hello, I’m John (Closer to 40 than 30), and I am not actually a programmer, more like interested party. But here’s my (long) story:
I was first introduced to programming via Quickbasic on DOS, did something really simple and stupid stuff and one actually really complicated “3D first person” dungeon crawler. Basically a really simplified computer generated maze in the vein of Dungeon Master RPG (1987). About 99% of that code was to get the weird drawing code to draw something that looked vaguely like a corridor with few white lines. Fugly stuff. I honestly don’t remember much about it, as I was really young.
Then I watched my friend start learning Pascal, then C, and Assembler, and then C++. We made bunch of small games, one with just pure assembler. I mostly listened to his explanations and helped brainstorming, but had no idea how to code. I did all the other stuff. Doing music with Tracker, Art, etc. All I knew that just from all his talk and from what I could see, I NEVER wanted to touch C++ or C. That seemed like the dumbest language known to mankind.
Forward some 5-10 years, and I decide that I want to learn to program at least a little. I looked at C, went “nope”, and then checked Python, tried it for a bit, did a plain text editor with it, and went “nope”, then tried Ruby… and nope.
You have to understand, I didn’t actually LEARN these languages, I just fiddled around with them until something happened and used bunch of tutorials as a crutch.
But then I learned about Lisp and started learning Common Lisp. I actually got fairly well into it, far enough that I understood the concepts fully and I got a real education in Vectors, Hash Maps, Lists and all that. I did some data manipulation code that handled inventory calculations (related to work), etc. That was the first time I actually learned to program anything without a crutch. But it didn’t take too long, maybe a year, into my journey into CL until I noticed that I couldn’t actually do anything useful with it.
I mean, anything modern you wanted to create with CL would require interfacing with some foreign C/C++ library for graphics/UI. And doing stuff without GUI was about as far from interesting as I could imagine. Despite using some libraries, tutorials, etc, to get GUI/et al – I finally gave up on it. Probably around when Clojure was very new, but I wasn’t really interested in it, or truly aware what it even meant.
Years pass.
Then about 3 years ago, I program something ridiculously stupid on Twine 2, because of a bet. It was a nightmare to code on Twine, because I didn’t want to touch Javascript. I had looked at Javascript once, and that was more than enough for me to swear to never touch it. So I used the inbuilt language (forget the name) but it only had global variables and huge limitations on how to do things. While I wasn’t a coder, I knew the concepts and had coded in the past – so I actually was very aware of the limitations.
So I got it done, but I figured that I really needed something more user friendly if I ever need to do something like that again. So I looked around, and somehow (I don’t remember how) I found Clojure. Saw Rich Hickey’s talk,“Are we there yet?” and went: “Damn, man, you got a point.” Gave the language a shot, and after the initial floundering of “WTF? Immutable?” I fell in love.
I love that Clojure has Opinions, with capital letter. That means it doesn’t just drop you off and say “here you go: stuff, do something with it, maybe”, it actually says “this is how things are done, deal with it”. I also love that it’s much more concise than CL ever was. It was real drag to write something like “hash-table-rehash-threshold” or “least-positive-normalized-double-float”. Okay, fairly extreme examples, but as a example CL “defun” is in Clojure “defn”, this goes all around the code. Also it uses “[” and “]” to good effect to clean up the code representation, also “{” and “}”. It’s very important to me that the code looks clean and legible.
I now use mostly Clojurescript + Reagent + Figwheel to do easy GUI stuff for myself. Possibly do a game some day, because why not?
speaking of “easy”, I would always recommend shadow-cljs, less time to deal error messages from Java. 
Hello!
I’m a designer and developer working at a small healthcare startup in Chicago. We’ve chosen Clojure/Script for quite a few of our projects, and we’ve even had the opportunity to extend existing Rails and React/Redux applications with Clojure.
I’m also into art and music, so I’ve been experimenting with stuff like leipzig and the thi.ng libraries.
Hello there!
I’m Dieter Komendera, @kommen on most internet things (twitter, github), based in Vienna, Austria and working on nextjournal.com.
So far my Clojure experience is limited, since we only started using Clojure itself this summer. We do use ClojureScript for something like 1 1/2 years now for the nextjournal editor, which eventually led us to Clojure. Now already a good part of the backend is in Clojure based on pedestal and Datomic.
If you’re interested in the journey to ClojureScript my college Philipp gave a talk about it at the Vienna React meetup last year which you can find here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6Q5D6mI-34
Before I’ve been doing Ruby/Rails development for the better part of the last 10 years, with a lot of iOS/ObjC/Swift and a bit of Erlang/Elixir and Javascript mixed in. (notice: no Lisp in there)
I can tell you that I’m pretty much sold on the whole Clojure and ClojureScript experience. Beginning from what the simplicity of the language gives you, to the powerful standard library, the a major and stable ecosystem and the awesome community.
So much for now, I’m looking forward to the Clojure-ride ahead, to participate in this community, to learn more and give back what we learned.
Cheers!