Introduce yourself!

odi · June 11, 2018, 12:37pm

Hi everyone, my name is Oliver and I am a Haskell developer from Austria.

I love to work with functional programming languages and because of there is a lot of
Java stuff in my surroundings I looked into Clojure in more detail to interact with
all the Java libraries and I love it!

As I worked with Emacs and ELisp for about 6 years and know the functional paradigma
from Haskell, my way to Clojure was not as hard as for some other people comming from
imperative languages.

I would be glad to see more and more Clojure libraries in established Java projects
because it’s so much fun to program in Clojure and it gives you many language elements
(lazy evaluation, immutable data structures, concurrency, …) which are all very
important in real world projects these days.

ronin78 · July 17, 2018, 9:21pm

My name is Matt. I am an academic researcher coming to Clojure by way of Java, mostly for NLP. I haven’t done much functional programming before, but I’ve wanted to learn a Lisp for a while. Clojure gives me an excuse to play around while still ostensibly working

Webdev_Tory · July 31, 2018, 12:10am

Welcome, Matt! Great to have another NLP’er here in Clojure! That’s one of my primary areas of work, too.

Webdev_Tory · July 31, 2018, 12:15am

I’ve posted and benefited from Clojureverse for a while, so I suppose I should finally get around to introduction. I’m Tory, and I’m a web application developer for Brigham Young University’s Humanities department, as well as a pursuing a PhD in Computer Science while I’m here. As an undergrad I was introduced to emacs by a professor, and I switched to Linux because emacs works better that way. The same professor got me established on a grad-school track where, during a summer internship, my AI work continued with a government agency, where the AI was programmed in Common Lisp. I took that opportunity to make the jump to Lisp for my graduate coursework, electing to make Clojure my primary language after years of Java, Perl, Javascript, and PHP. I have never looked back (although I have to spend some amount of time still maintaining old, pain-inducing PHP codebases). Aside from fairly straight-forward Web Applications, I wield Clojure as I pursue my research in narrative, including artificial intelligence, language processing, discourse analysis, and transmedia.

I’m at http://tech.toryanderson.com, and am also active on Twitter.

In 2018 I am mastering mathematical applications and data visualization with d3js.

bartuka · July 31, 2018, 1:51am

Hi, I am Wanderson Ferreira and I work for Captalys a financial company in Brazil. I’m a heavy Emacs user since 2016 and I started to look with more care to Clojure recently. I am right now studying the language and practicing in small projects by myself, but I want to achieve a very good level of knowledge until the end of this year.

I’m a Machine Learning Engineer, but I am also changing my focus to pure software development. Hope I can share some thoughts here at the forum!

avillega · August 11, 2018, 5:49pm

Hi, I am Andres, from Colombia.
I am a professional Java Developer, right now I am working with the programmatic advertisement. I am starting with Clojure and I am loving it so far. I’ve been doing some generative art with quil and experimenting with games, Tic Tac Toe, minesweeper… .

My idea is to start contributing with opensource projects and probably creating some kind of library that has to do with generative art.

emil0r · August 21, 2018, 4:56pm

(repeatedly #(rand-nth [
["your journey towards Clojure"
 "Wanted to learn lisp after Paul Graham's essays, found Clojure was a lisp, gave it a try and never looked back"]

["the things you’re working on"
 "Currently working on a testing tool focused on simulation testing called Mimic"]
                                     
["where you’re from or where you live"
 "Sweden, Norway"]

["you elsewhere on the web (home page, Twitter or Github account)"
 {:homepage "http://emil0r.com"
  :github "https://github.com/emil0r"}]

["how people can support you"
 "Wouldn't mind a couple of volunteers to try out Mimic"]
           
[ "any particular hobbies or interests"
 "Writing the perfect program"]

["anything else you like to share"
 "<a href='https://youtu.be/bbcsz8sb7Cg'>Below The Asteroids</a> is still good for getting into the Zone more than ten years later"]
]))```

thosmos · August 26, 2018, 7:05am

Hi All!

My name is Thomas Spellman. I live in the western foothills of the California Sierra Mountains. I’ve been programming in Clojure for a few years now after having coded professionally since 2003 (https://code.thosmos.com/pages/resume.html).

I’m currently using Clojure and Datomic to build the backend to a water quality data management system for citizen-driven watershed monitoring projects ( http://riverdb.org ). If you’re into this kind of project, we’d love your help (volunteer for now)! We’ll eventually be able to pay but for now we’re a mostly free-time project.

I really like the language and am happy to have had a few professional opportunities to use it. I like that its basic syntax is extremely simple yet is capable of elegant and concise extension to exactly fit the needs of the project, and am inspired by the wonderful thought and care that’s been put into its design and evolution. I’m consistently inspired and impressed by many people in the community.

I’m also a quasi-pro musician, having played bass and lead guitar on 6 tours with 3 different bands in the western US in the past year, and am looking forward to doing my own first solo tour within the next year or so. Here’s a rough draft of an album I recorded in two days in my home studio: https://spellmusic.bandcamp.com/

Thank you for inviting us to introduce ourselves! I really like this community and it’s a pleasure to get to be a part of it.

Thomas

jclavijo · September 6, 2018, 8:12pm

Hello all, It’s great to find a community of Clojure engineers. I’ve been programming Clojure for the last 5 years. I’m currently working on a Startup and I’m trying to build a team of engineers to work on Carbon sustainability using ML/DL. Looking forward to working with this community.

vvvvalvalval · September 7, 2018, 9:08am

@jclavijo Very interested in this, could you tell me more about the project? You can reach me at val.vvalval at gmail.com

beders · September 13, 2018, 7:23pm

Hi everyone,

I’m Jochen, dialing in from the bay area. Originally from the Saarland.
I got to know Lisp around 1992, working as a research assistant at the German Research Center for AI.
They had Symbolics Lisp machines as well as Allegro Common Lisp running on Sparc machines.
Ancient stuff, but we did natural language parsing back then.

After long years of Java and JavaScript, I’ve rediscovered the joys of the REPL and fast turn-around.
Clojure is wonderful for experimentation and bottom up coding.

I’m hoping to start a day time job doing Clojure back in the Saarland soon. If any German clojurists are interested in a job, ping me on twitter @beders

sbr · September 19, 2018, 10:09am

Hello,
my name is Sophia.
I am teaching myself computer programming and web development with the help of books, courses, etc.
I tried Javascript first with FreeCodeCamp but I find the language sorely lacking.

After a while I stumbled over “How to Design Programs” which uses Racket. I really liked the systematic approach, something which is hard to teach and what most online courses fail to do.

From Racket, I went to Clojure because I wanted something more practical.

I would like to switch careers to becoming a web developer but I’m afraid that it’s more difficult with Clojure than with a more popular language. That’s why I also dabble in Python and Javascript while trying to distill it all down to the fundamentals of program design.

yqrashawn · September 23, 2018, 1:03pm

Rashawn, living in Beijing China. Start learning clojure only several months ago. Emacs brings me to lisp and lisp brings me to clojure. I mainly work on 3D stuff in frontend, mostly WEBGL and javascript.

I’m also working on a personal project called GokuRakuJoudo, which enables user to config the macOS key binding software karabiner with edn file instead of json file. I suppose there’s a lot wrong use case and patterns in the project. And I’ll keep learning and polish the project.

Seeing some of clojure versers got the chance to write clojure in their company, that’s my dream!

GaryRawlings · September 25, 2018, 5:14pm

Hi - I’m Gary,

After 20+ years of building systems in small and large firms I’ve taken a fairly significant change of direction and now co-own an IT recruitment firm. I’ve done VB, C, C++ and Java but never touched functional programming until a client of my new firm asked for some help to find talented Clojure developers.

Being different from other agencies I wanted to make sure me and the team know what we’re talking about so hence came here to learn. The group looks great with lots of lively debate so am looking forward to learning / contributing.

doubleelbow · September 29, 2018, 8:47pm

Hi, I’m Luka Komovec from Slovenia. Just to bore you with some details … the Levenshtein distance between my last name and Slovenian word for elbow is 1. That’s why I fabricated a pseudonym Luca L. Bow and readable version of it’s shorter form as doubleelbow. It’s a pun on my actual name – admittedly a bad one because it has to be explained - and it’s nearly a palindrome. I like puns but I think that jokes that need to be explained are jokes.

I look at programming as problem solving activity and until finding clojure I never thought a language could make such a difference. It just never gets in the way.

Currently I’m working on capital, a library that helps with calls to external systems especially when unexpected / temporary failures happen.

mml · November 20, 2018, 8:44pm

Hi everybody!

I am Mauricio, an spanish programmer living now in Brazil, my only contact with a lisp family language was scheme during my faculty years, 25 years ago, along those years i have been working mainly in c++ and python super boring projects… so boring, that the only fun i have been programming during this millennium was making retro games in assembly for old 80s computers … And now, i want to recover the fun in my job and I believe that Clojure is the key to it

Ijanus · December 6, 2018, 7:30am

I am Emeka. I participated actively during Clojure early years. I left about 6years ago. However I have decided to return and participate with you all . I would like to be active and engaged , I am willing to close the gap I have .
I would like to join active projects so as to learn and improve myself.

Emeka

PEZ · December 6, 2018, 9:04am

Cool! Have a look at What is CLJ-Commons?

bcambel · December 6, 2018, 8:21pm

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

PEZ · December 6, 2018, 10:26pm

It is not gone, right?