Clojure in Product. Would you do it again?

In the third episode, join our hosts Vadym Kostiuk and Artem Barmin as they walk through the journey of Marten Sytema, founder at Catermonkey, a solo engineer turned product creator. Explore Marten's vision about Java, Haskell, and Python, his passion for Clojure, and how this technology transformed his approach to software product development. Marten told the story behind CaterMonkey, a smart CRM solution for catering businesses, and the competitive edge Clojure offered for his company.

We highlight the practicalities of building a startup with Clojure, both challenges and triumphs, including hiring practices, effective use of technology, and fostering a productive development culture.

• CaterMonkey CRM: https://catermonkey.com
• Simple Made Easy: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy
• Freshcode Clojure team: https://www.freshcodeit.com/services/clojure-development-company

Meet our guest, Adam Tornhill—founder of CodeScene, a seasoned programmer with nearly 30 years of experience, and author of the book "Your Code as a Crime Scene." In this episode, we explore Adam's expertise in software product development and how CodeScene's Clojure team navigates the challenges of technical debt, late delivery, and code quality.

Adam explains his decision to use Clojure as the primary technology for CodeScene and shares his proven approach to behavioral code analysis. We highlighted the benefits like increased productivity, JVM integration, and sheer enjoyment, as well as some challenges related to the dynamic typing system.

• The CodeScene behavioral code analysis tool: ⁠codescene.com⁠
• ACE: the AI-powered refactoring tool: ⁠codescene.com/product/ai-coding⁠
• Freshcode Clojure team: ⁠freshcodeit.com/services/clojure-development-company⁠
• Your Code as a Crime Scene, Second Edition by Adam Tornhill: ⁠pragprog.com/titles/atcrime2/your-code-as-a-crime-scene-second-edition⁠
• Beating the Averages by Paul Graham: ⁠paulgraham.com/avg.html

We sat down with Kalle Korhonen, CPO at Quuppa, to learn about his journey of introducing Clojure into a primarily Java-based enterprise system. Kalle shared how Quuppa, a Finnish company specializing in indoor positioning technology, uses Clojure to build and maintain its enterprise management system. Kalle walked us through their transition from Java to Clojure and ClojureScript, explaining how they manage distributed systems and hardware integration.

We discussed their experience with Clojure frameworks like Re-frame, Reagent, and Integrant and described what it takes to build a team of developers interested in working with Clojure. Throughout our conversation, Kalle shared insights about frontend and backend development challenges in a Clojure/ClojureScript environment and discussed practical aspects like IDE choices and build tools in day-to-day development.

Episode page: https://www.freshcodeit.com/podcast/we-are-writing-in-clojure