Simple ideas with huge impact from Clojure and Rama (by Nathan Marz)

Nathan Marz discusses how uniformity and composition in Clojure and Rama eliminate complexity in backend development.

The London Clojurians are happy to present: ~~~~ reClojure 2025 ~~~ Title: Simple ideas with huge impact from Clojure and Rama Speaker: Nathan Marz Clojure is full of great ideas. Some are inherited from the Lisps that came before, like homoiconicity. Others are new to Clojure, like its emphasis (but not mandate) on immutability. The ideas with the biggest impact eliminate complexity, create leverage, or both. Both homoiconicity and immutability achieve these by creating uniformity. Uniformity enables composition, and composition creates leverage. Rama builds upon the ideas in Clojure to bring uniformity and composability to backend development. Ideas like data structures instead of data models for indexed datastores and colocating computation and storage have a huge effect on simplifying backend development and enabling much more to be done with much less. Speaker Bio: Nathan is the founder of Red Planet Labs. Previously he created a number of popular open-source projects, the most well-known being Apache Storm. Storm was the first open-source project to enable reliable processing of data at large scale in real time. Nathan has programmed primarily in Clojure since 2010. His biggest open-source contribution in Clojure is Specter, which enables data structures both simple and complex to be queried and transformed extremely concisely and with performance rivaling hand-optimized code. Nathan wrote the book "Big Data: principles and best practices of scalable realtime data systems". Before Red Planet Labs, Nathan was an engineer at Twitter where he founded one of their core infrastructure teams. Thank you to our sponsors: - juxt.pro/ - flexiana.com/ - freshcodeit.com/ - nubank.com.br/