Introduce yourself!

[martinklepsch]

Hi, I’m Martin

I’ve been programming before but Clojure is the first language where I really got into the community — and that’s what gets you hooked haha. Today I’m a contractor focusing mostly on Clojure stuff.

Right now I’m interestingly working on an iOS app written in Swift involving Augmented Reality and some machine learning. I’ve never used a typed language for anything serious so it’s quite an experience. Today I fought the compiler. The compiler lost. (But only because other awesome people were kind enough to give some guidance.)

I’m @martinklepsch almost everywhere and sometimes post random stuff on my blog.
Besides all the tech stuff I’m into bouldering, travelling and follow some occasional interests in decentralization tech (blockchain but also other approaches) and personal investing.

[saskia]

Hi everyone

My name is Saskia and I am happy to call Berlin my home for the moment. I’m in the lucky position to have been writing Clojure for personal projects, open source and work within the last year. Very grateful to have found the local Clojure community that has become a big part of my life. It was the first programming language I truly enjoyed and since my first day of writing it, people have been kind, open and supportive.

At my first internship, I got to experiment and learn with Clojure and Datomic while I was surrounded by people who had been active in the community through organizing events and working on open source projects. This year, I got to work on a ClojureScript project with re-frame and started my first job this month being able to continue working in the same field.

When I’m not programming, you will probably find me playing piano, dancing, traveling or writing. I mostly drink tea and enjoy a good coffee every once in a while.

[juhoteperi]

Hi,

I’m Juho from Finland. I’m juhoteperi on Slack and Twitter (and here), but still use alias Deraen on Github.

I’ve been working with Clojure(Script) at Metosin for four and half years. Before this I have experience with languages like PHP, C++, JS, Python, from school and hobby projects. I learned Clojure only after starting at Metosin.

During the last four years at Metosin, we have built open-source libs like Compojure-api and expanded ClojuTRE to one of the biggest Clojure events on Europe. For the latter, I haven’t really been part of the hard organization side, but I do maintain the site (it is built with Clojure obviously, like our company homepage) and take care of the tech stuff, like videos.

I also maintain boot-cljs and related tools, cljsjs (created by @martinklepsch ) and Reagent. I do occasionally contribute to ClojureScript compiler, usually related to JS library support. Btw. I think cljsjs is currently the Clojure project with the most contributors in Github.

I drink tea at morning and coffee after lunch. I enjoy many non-programming activities, like craft beers, cooking… On sport side, nordic skating is one of my favorites, the lakes don’t have hills so it isn’t as much work as skiing

[gdeer81]

My Clojure journey started when I happened to win a copy of Clojure Programming on the Java Ranch forum 5 years ago https://coderanch.com/t/586952/Winners-Clojure-Programming

I was working as a junior developer at a south Texas grocery company and since everyone takes off for Christmas there was some down time which gave me an opportunity to experiment with this crazy new language I was reading about.

In the five years since I decided to learn Clojure I have grown a lot as a developer. I’m now a senior developer at the same grocery company. Clojure has been my preferred vehicle for exploring new concepts.

About me personally : I like live music, live coding, math, art, science, and playing guitar.

I really love this community and want to see it flourish

Edit: I would also like to thank @seancorfield for answering all my newbie questions on the Java forums until I found the clojure irc channel

Ps: would be lovely if you could Marginalia a star on GitHub

GitHub - clj-commons/marginalia: Ultra-lightweight literate programming for...

I’ve also created a topic for discussing Marginalia

Try Marginalia and let me know what you think of literate programming

Back in August of 2013 Michael Fogus trusted me to take the reins of one of his many open source libraries http://blog.fogus.me/2013/08/12/marginalia-has-a-new-home/ As someone who had been learning Clojure for almost a year I thought it would be an educational experience for me. Fogus felt the same way and he rest is history. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. But after four years I’m starting to get the hang of this whole open source maintainer thing. So now that I’m not deathl…

[BigDaddyTank]

Hello.

I’m an almost college graduate (with a 2-year general IT degree) who’s been learning about programming for about a year now and I massively enjoy Clojure and ClojureScript, as well as Elixir, Scala, Lua, Nim, Rust, and Elm. Though at the moment I’m trying my best to stay focused on Clojure.

I’m a big fan of Linux (I’m a Void user) and BSD, and I’m a Spacemacs user, but I also like Intellij and Neovim. I’m really interested in machine learning and data science, and somewhat interested in web development.

At the moment I’m just interning at a technology consulting company helping them revamp their WordPress (ew) site. I would like to be trying to contribute to some open source Clojure projects or some aspects of Spacemacs, but I’m more nervous than anything to try and contribute to anything. Hopefully I can slowly work my way more and more into that while I try to further my career.

[jumar]

HI!
I’m Juraj (usually using jumar or jumarko nicknames) and I’ve been playing with Clojure for the last 2 years.
Recently, I’ve been fortunate enough to land a Clojure job - I’m now working on CodeScene code analysis tool.
I’m still learning a lot of stuff every day and really love the Clojure community.
I post Clojure related stuff on my blog: https://curiousprogrammer.net/

[plexus]

Hi Juraj, I looked at codescene a while back, it looks like a really interesting tool.

If you have new blog posts up then feel free to share them in the #learning-resources:blogs category.

[GKlijs]

HI, I’m Gerard and I live in Papendrecht, near Rotterdam in the Netherlands.

I first learned about Clojure about 1,5 year and then read Clojure for the Brave and True. Being a web developer, Hippo Cms (java), in my job, I really like the clojure/clojurescript interop. I made a multiple player snake game using web sockets, and added some rule-based controled snakes. Now I’m working on a website with some cms-functionality, depending heavily on clojure spec to edit/store the data, and using clojure-nginx (https://github.com/nginx-clojure/nginx-clojure) for the webserver.

[joannecheng]

Hi all! My name is Joanne. I live in Denver, Colorado. I just left Keen IO, where I was mostly writing React apps. I have been playing around with Clojure/Clojurescript side projects for about a month now, so I’m still quite new to it. I’ve been a web developer for many years, but lately I’ve been excited about data analysis, visualization, and machine learning.

When I’m not coding, I’m usually at a dance class, thinking way too much about dancing, or out playing in the rocky mountains.

I am currently drinking a decaf coffee

[Marcin]

Hi!

I’m Marcin and I live in Zielona Góra, Poland.

I do not use Clojure professionally but I play with it from time to time. Some results of it are on my github profile.

I drink both coffee and tea

[BigDaddyTank]

Were you writing React apps in a ClojureScript React library? Or just vanilla React? (ew)

[joannecheng]

Nope, I was just writing vanilla react with ES6, I was playing with ClojureScript on the side. I have to say I really enjoy ClojureScript a lot more

[darwin]

Hey, I’m Antonin from Czech Republic.

I discovered ClojureScript in 2015 coming from Javascript frontend. This forced me to touch JVM and inspired me to start using Clojure for some “backend” work as well.

I love making tools. I used to be a game developer and worked mostly on tooling. Then I moved to web startups and worked mostly on tooling. Then I started my own company hacking on mac apps and that required me to build a lot of tooling around it. And recently I started with ClojureScript. And guess what? I started working on some tools and libraries: cljs-devtools, dirac, cljs-oops, chromex or env-config.

I was looking for a language which I would be able to use on all future platforms and environments. And I’m starting to have a feeling that this hosted-clojure-flavored-lisp or something very similar might be the way to go. The time will tell.

[dandorman]

Hi! I’m Dan. I’m a programmer in Utah. I don’t have any interesting Clojure stories, but I really enjoy the language. I’ve been using it as a hobbyist for several years. For the past couple, some like-minded coworkers and I have been injecting more and more Clojure into our stack. It’s been really cool getting our colleagues interested!

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the thoughtful, respectful posts here at Clojureverse. I’m excited to see where it goes!

[ericnormand]

Hi! I’m Eric Normand.

I came to Clojure in 2008 after falling in love with Lisp in about 2001–while I was still in college. I started doing my assignments in Lisp and had way less trouble that doing them in Java. I tried to build a startup on Common Lisp but didn’t get very far. Then when Clojure came out, I gave it a try and never looked back.

I teach Clojure and Functional Programming at PurelyFunctional.tv. There I publish a weekly newsletter and video courses on Clojure. I help people thrive with Clojure. I also have a personal blog called LispCast.

I believe that Functional Programming can help make better software. I jokingly say that I want to make the world safe for Functional Programming.

I love getting to know people and helping with the basics. Reach out if you’re interested.

Rock on!
Eric

[davidsavoie1]

Hi! My name is David Savoie, former professional mechanical engineer converted to software engineer only a year ago.

TL;DR

(def David
  (let [startAs  "Mechanical Engineer"
        topics   ["HTML" "JS" "Meteor" "React" "Ramda" "Haskell" "Scala" "Clojure"]
        learn    (fn [knowledge subj] (str knowledge " > " subj))]
    (reduce learn startAs topics)))

Story

I started learning Web development from the ground up about a year ago (HTML, JS, CSS, MeteorJS, React, etc.). I’m still a beginner at all of this, but I’m deeply obsessed by it all… even more so since I discovered functional programming!

I stumbled upon Ramda.js while looking at utility libraries for my Javascript projects, like Underscore or Lodash. At first, it looked way too different than anything else, but eventually, I came to love it! I used Ramda extensively for one project in particular and it got me hooked into FP.

I studied Haskell for a while, trying to grasp the basic concepts. Eventually however, I felt it was too much to handle: monads, functors, applicative functors, declaring types all over the place and on and on… I’m sure it’s brilliant, but it was too much for me at the time.

I searched some more to try to find a more accessible FP language to play with and maybe use in production. I looked into Scala for a while, really enthusiastic about the multi-paradigm approach, until I tried to build something with it. I became frustrated with the complexity and boilerplate associated with it. Again, maybe I didn’t get it, but I looked some more since I deeply wanted an FP language I could use as a foundation.

Then I’ve found Clojure and I’m beginning to fiddle with it. This language really resonates with me, I do feel at home with it. I really hope to make it work right this time so I can actually work with FP paradigm day-in, day-out. Glad to join this community!

By the way, I’m in Quebec, Canada, and French is my first language!

[Bronsa]

Hi all, I’m Nicola Mometto (I go by Bronsa online).
I’m 24, Italian but I’ve been working and living in London for the past 2 years.

I’ve been using clojure since the 1.2 days, so for almost 7 years!
I’m author of a number of clojure contrib libraries: tools.reader, tools.analyzer, tools.analyzer.jvm, tools.emitter.jvm and the more more recent (non-contrib) tools.decompiler and I’m a frequent contributor to clojure itself.

[borkdude]

Recently listened to this episode on Cognicast. It was very interesting, thank you.

Nicola Mometto - Cognicast Episode 134

[Miikka]

Hi! I’m Miikka, from Helsinki.

I first learned Clojure in 2012 via the first iteration of what eventually became the iloveponies Clojure MOOC, and in 2013 I got my first Clojure job that involved waste-sorting industrial robots. Nowadays I work for Metosin, mostly creating full-stack web software in Clojure.

My open source contributions tend to be something else than code. Always I think “now I’m going to write some code for open source projects”, but end up doing code reviews, debugging, and writing GitHub issues…

I like drinking good coffee (GLC is a favorite), and I like brewing it, too, but who am I to say no to a good cup of tea?

Cool to see such a wide range of Clojure experience on this forum!

[webappzero]

Howdy Y’all, I’m Jay Martin, a raving Clojure fan from Columbia, South Carolina, USA. After reading every post in this topic, I can say that I’m glad to meet each of you and look forward to interacting with you over the years to come.

I organize a local Clojure user group called Clojure Co-Lab here in town and was also trying to grow an online Clojure forum, but have recommended to that group that we put our efforts into this community instead because our goals are so similar.

I found Clojure by way of Datomic a couple years back and this is my preferred stack. My business partner sees the benefits of Clojure as well and we intend to use it pervasively. We share many of the values of the open source community and intend to contribute as much as possible to help future Clojure newcomers learn this beautiful language more efficiently.

I still feel like I’m learning to solve problems with Clojure and am sure I have so much yet to learn. Even so, I offer the attendees of our local user group free one-on-one mentorship and support because that’s the one thing I wish I had access to when I started.

Once I got the courage to ask for help, the Clojure community has been more generous than I ever imagined. I attended my first and only Clojure Conj in Austin, Texas in December of 2016 and I was blown away by how awesome the people in this community are. At times, being “self-taught” feels like drinking water from a firehose, but I take heart in the knowledge that Clojure’s strengths will protect me from chaos.

I’m humbled by this experience and honored to learn alongside each of you! My best : )

P.S. I love the taste of coffee but prefer the effects herbal teas without caffeine.