Clojure in product. Would you do it again? Episode 7. Nathan Marz, Red Planet Labs

Nathan Marz discusses his 15-year journey with Clojure, building scalable systems, and creating the Rama platform.

In the 7th episode, we speak with Nathan Marz, founder of Red Planet Labs and creator of Apache Storm, about his 15-year programming journey and the challenges of building scalable systems in Clojure. Nathan shares his experiences with Clojure and his innovative work on Rama, a platform that simplifies software development. Our conversation covers testing techniques like with-redefs for debugging, the challenges of hiring Clojure developers, and the architecture's approach to event sourcing and materialized views. Nathan explains why Clojure was the ideal choice for Rama and highlights his team's learning curve and the need for strong engineering expertise. Tune in for valuable insights into the complexities of building scalable applications with Clojure and its evolving ecosystem. Subscribe to our podcast for more! Worth your attention: paulgraham.com/avg.html storm.apache.org/releases/2.2.1/Clojure-DSL.html redplanetlabs.com/ blog.redplanetlabs.com/2021/06/03/tour-of-our-250k-line-cloj… Blog posts: Deep dive into how we reduced the line count for building the Twitter consumer product at scale by 100x: blog.redplanetlabs.com/2023/08/15/how-we-reduced-the-cost-of… Introduction to Rama's Clojure API: blog.redplanetlabs.com/2023/10/11/introducing-ramas-clojure-… Post focused on Rama's new programming paradigm blog.redplanetlabs.com/2024/10/10/rama-on-clojures-terms-and… Introduction to Rama's instant migrations and how they work blog.redplanetlabs.com/2024/09/30/migrating-terabytes-of-dat… 0:00 - Teaser 0:55 - Intro 2:14 - Lisp, Cascalog and coming into Clojure 4:50 - Red Planet Labs. Choosing and Sticking to Clojure 6:36 - Rama. New paradigm. New Platform. 9:22 - Clojure in Rama 15:48 - Rama in production 23:32 - Rama vs Datomic 25:18 - Clojure deficiencies for high performance and the workarounds 31:00 - Clojure alternative core library 31:12 - Lessons learned building a high-performance platform in Clojure 35:42 - Schema 38:09 - Testing coverage. Mutation Testing. Chaos testing. 40:50 - Strength of Clojure for testing 43:07 - Over-engineering and how to avoid it 46:27 - Building and leading a team 49:11 - Hiring Clojure Engineers 57:17 - State of Clojrue ecosystem 01:00:55 - Question from the previous guest 01:04:05 - Question from Nathan #clojure #productdevelopment #java #c++ #softwaredevelopment #freshcode Tune in for valuable insights into the complexities of building scalable applications with Clojure and its evolving ecosystem. Subscribe to our podcast for more!