Welcome Daye. What’s the Clojure community like in Beijing at the moment?
sounds awesome!
At the end of the day, Clojure and functional programming is all about simplicity. I find that learning Clojure and FP was more about un-learning a lot of habits and old ideas.
It might seem overwhelming at first, but after a short while things will start making sense and clicking faster than ever.
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Hi! I’m Joel, a Brazilian programmer who’s into Elixir and FP.
I’ve been coding since 2002 - professionally since 2005, and after using ActionScript, Bash, JavaScript, PHP, and Ruby, I’m into the world of Elixir. I’m also interested in learning Clojure because it’s a powerful functional programming language, and its community carries a lot of wisdom when it comes to software engineering. I’m intended to become a better programmer by learning Clojure/LISP.
Beyond technology, I’m a calisthenics rookie, a retired amateur muay thai fighter, I bike sometimes but I also like cars and stuff, etc.
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Hi all.
I’m Crispin Wellington, and I live in Perth, Western Australia.
I’ve been programming since I was 8 years old, when my Dad brought home a TI-99/4A.
I’ve worked in a number of different roles, from system admin, to software development and management.
I first encountered Clojure in 2010 and have been using it ever since.
A few years ago I started my own consultancy, epiccastle.io, where I help clients sort, troubleshoot and improve their devops.
I started to get frustrated with some of the limitations of Ansible, and so I created a domain-specific clojure dialect aimed at provisioning machines, based on sci. (Epic Castle - Spire: Pragmatic Provisioning)
Along the way I also created a backgammon web app (www.backgammonbuddy.com) using clojure, reagent and postgresql.
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Hi everyone,
I’m Pieter Breed from Cape Town SA.
I’ve been writing “computer programs” for about 25 years. A semi-drunk computer professor introduced me to LISP this one time and I’ve been patiently biding my time waiting for professional lisp opportunities ever since keeping busy writing java, c / c++ / c#, python, ruby, javascript and bash (mostly).
I wrote my first clojure code around the time version 1.2 was new and the last 5 years of my career was spent in a mix of AWS devops, kafka and clojure at a FinTech company.
Most recently I’ve entered the consultancy phase of my career, looking to see if I can help companies solve some of their more difficult computing problems using any of the array of tools and utilities in my toolkit.
Well met all 
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Hello Clojureverse, my name is PJ. I’m from Singapore, and I’m a beginner at coding. My day job is as a service designer/manager and product manager in a government agency. I completed an interaction design programme at CIID in 2019, and before that, studied chemical physics in the US.
I came across coding when I studied interaction design, and thought code was super awesome as a medium of expression.
Came across Clojure from Paul Graham’s tweet reply to a question of a Lisp that might give a competitive advantage.
I haven’t built anything on Clojure nor any other language at this point: I’ve been trying to learn the basics of web dev before building some ideas I have in mind. While working through an online bootcamp for web dev, I realised that I was picking up a lot of bad habits e.g. using a lot of global variables, which made it really hard to debug (esp. for Javascript).
Right now I want to learn Clojure & Clojurescript, without picking up bad-habits from the other web dev languages, because it feels to me that Clojure could be a force-multiplier, but also generally it feels a lot more elegant mentally. I was also struck by this quote from the Clojurescript page:
*“Learning to use ClojureScript, Om, and React finally made me feel like I was taking ownership of my design work from beginning to end.” *
-Danny King, Co-Founder/Designer
Precursor
I’m picking my way through Eric Normand’s courses, which are very structured and clear (though pricing is steep). At this point, I’m trying to figure out which editor to use, which I had asked on the Clojurian Slack channel.
I drink coffee (pour over, usually) and tea (usually Oolong, frequently Guangdong Phoenix Mountain (Fengshan) as well as Shuixian)
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Hello everyone!
I’m Mat, from São Paulo, Brazil. I’m getting back into Clojure after many years. I’m working on koan exercises to get back on track with the language. I’ve been programming for over 15 years and I’m currently managing a couple of small teams working mostly with Java!
I hope to learn and contribute a lot with this community!
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Hey there 
My name is Joakim, I’m a 33 year old backend dev from Norway. 
I have roughly 10 years of experience in the industry, primarily with imperative and object-oriented languages.
I’ve been looking to adopt Clojure as a general purpose language for personal projects, as I find myself solving too many tasks with shell-scripts, and Lisps are more intriguing than picking up yet another imperative language.
After poking around in various articles and forum posts, I find myself wanting a more streamlined learning-process, perhaps a book or a course. This might be out of scope of an introduction-post, but I would greatly appreciate if anyone could point me in the direction of some comprehensive learning-resources (doesn’t have to be free).
Example topics I would love to learn about are
- Idiomatic error handling
- Clojure in Kubernetes (cold-start challenges, native-image compilation with GraalVM, etc)
- TDD in Clojure (how do people adapt the repl-workflow to regular red/green/refactor-workflow)
In short, there’s a bunch of questions regarding workflow, process and how Clojure fits into the age of containers that I’d love to learn about, and I would love any recommendations on up-to-date learning material.
Thanks for reading this far, and again, hello 
Hey @PEZ! I actually saw your talk on Developer Ergonomics on YouTube just a few days ago, great talk 
I’ve tinkered a bit with babashka, although I haven’t yet been able to “bridge the gap” between regular shellscripts and Clojure, likely due to my limited understanding of Clojure and lisps in general. It’s definitely something I expect to explore more
Thanks a lot for the links, they seem like solid resources 
edit: Also, thank you for your efforts on Calva. Although I haven’t tried Cider or any other solution, the experience has been really great so far.
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Hi, I’m Stu. I’m from Glasgow, Scotland. Probably unlike most people here my background is not really in programming. I trained as a biologist and worked in biotech for about a decade, and during that time I wrote a couple of Clojure apps, including one to do some basic DNA sequence analysis.
Since that time I’ve moved to Ottawa, capital of Canada. I’d probably have to go back to school and update my biology qualifications if I wanted to work in a lab here, but I’ve been putting that off by doing odd IT jobs, administering a couple of servers and so on. Earlier this year I moved my wife’s newsletter from Substack to a self-hosted Ghost instance, which was sort of nailbiting and interesting.
A local business has offered me work writing a small web app for them. At first I thought of doing it in Django, which I’ve messed around in a little, but to be honest I didn’t really enjoy Django, and Clojure was a lot of fun, so I’m going to use Clojure. It will be interesting to see how it has changed in the five years or so since I last used it.
I haven’t written anything for production in Clojure before (all my previous work was for internal company use) so I’ll have to figure out how to do authentication, etc. This will also be my first time trying Clojurescript. If anyone has suggestions for good learning resources (I loved 4clojure back in the day), please do send them my way!
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Hi there Stu! It seems you are a bit past the target audience for the Get Started with Clojure experience I put together last week, but it does contain some further learning resources
I suggest you join the Clojurians Slack, if you haven’t, and ask about learning resources in the #clojurescript channel there.
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Hei guys,
My name is Ovidiu! I am 26-year-old software dev. I have 5 years of professional experience, with a focus on frontend and UI. At my day job, I use typescript, and I have been working with Clojure on an indie project of mine - Designvote for about 8 months.
I must say that the first 4 months of it were tough. A lot of times, I would say to myself, “Oh my god, why did I pick this language? This would’ve been done in 10 minutes in node with a lib,” but after a point, I realized the power of it, it was like a click “I have instant feedback on everything I write,” it was like magic.
How did I find Clojure? I was looking for a new job 9 months ago, and I found out about Flexiana. They were hiring a React Native developer (my then specialty), and on their website, they said they were fully dedicated to Clojure. I read their page about why Clojure and then fell into the Rich Talks Youtube, which got me to buy a course and then to make my server API in Clojure.
Awesome being here and hope to make a lot of friends!
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Hey Stu,
As someone from not far from Glasgow, who picked up Clojure from a not programming background, and who wants to make a webapp with authentication, I’d be happy to team-up on the common problems?
To answer your question, the book ‘Web development with Clojure’ (Web Development with Clojure, Third Edition: Build Large, Maintainable Web Applications Interactively by Dmitri Sotnikov and Scot Brown) might be handy. I haven’t worked through it yet but it looks useful, if not ideal in some places.
Hello
I am learning Clojure on my own - hoping to convince the folks at work to adopt it as we move away from perl.
I love my coffee in the morning and have a small farm where my wife and I are trying to figure out sustainable agriculture as wel as about a billion housepets as well. Counting our two kids, the pets only outnumber us 5 to 1.
Otherwise, I like music - play a little guitar, sing a little, and enjoy a cup of coffee in the morning.
Thanks so much for being a part of this community - I look forward to learning together and hope to be able to be helpful at some point!
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Hi
I’m curious what course you picked out to start off with? I have been going through “Clojure for the brave and true” and like it well enough, but I’m sure other resources would be good to have.
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Hello all
My name is Felix - I’m from Australia and I was introduced to Clojure about 10 years ago (by another Felix!). At the time I was learning Python and wasn’t ready to pickup Clojure, but I watched Simple Made Easy and was struck by Rich’s vision.
As I learned more about Clojure I found the way I thought about computer systems and programming (Python) was changing to become more “functional”.
Then about 4 or 5 years ago I started some hobby projects which were painful at times, but the longer I invested in Clojure(script) the more I became convinced of its benefits.
Today, I’m about 12 months into co-founding a Clojure full-stack startup. Our stack includes datomic, datascript, sente, keechma-next, shadow-cljs and helix (plus of course a bunch of Javascript and Java). We’re a GCP build partner, so we run all of that tightly integrated with the Google cloud stack (GKE) which has been great too.
I guess you could say, I’m betting on Clojure!
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Hey there!
I’m Shawn and I’ve been working with IT operations automation and light business analytics for about five years - mostly with C#, PHP, and loads of SQL.
I’ve been interested in FP for a while now. After reading a lot about Clojure and watching talks, I decided to dive in by developing uniformity, an easy-to-use cryptography library that (should) behave the same on JVM or with ClojureScript. I hope to add CLR support soon.
Eventually I’d like to try creating a system like ASP.NET’s DataProtection, with auto-rotating keys backed by a variety of storage possibilities. I’m also interested experimenting with writing a DSL + web app combo that allows users of the application to very easily describe what data they’d like to have in the system, and validation (and maybe business) rules for it.
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Hello,
My name is chika, and I’m from Nigeria.
Clojurian for about 4 months now.
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