Mastering Large-Scale Systems in Clojure

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 designed to simplify 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.

Worth your attention:

• https://paulgraham.com/avg.html
• https://storm.apache.org/releases/2.2.1/Clojure-DSL.html
• https://redplanetlabs.com/
• https://blog.redplanetlabs.com/2021/06/03/tour-of-our-250k-line-clojure-codebase/
• Blog posts:
  • Deep dive into how we reduced the line count for building the Twitter consumer product at scale by 100x: https://blog.redplanetlabs.com/2023/08/15/how-we-reduced-the-cost-of-building-twitter-at-twitter-scale-by-100x/
  • Introduction to Rama's Clojure API: https://blog.redplanetlabs.com/2023/10/11/introducing-ramas-clojure-api/
  • Post focused on Rama's new programming paradigm https://blog.redplanetlabs.com/2024/10/10/rama-on-clojures-terms-and-the-magic-of-continuation-passing-style/
  • Introduction to Rama's instant migrations and how they work https://blog.redplanetlabs.com/2024/09/30/migrating-terabytes-of-data-instantly-can-your-alter-table-do-this/

#clojure #productdevelopment #java #c++ #softwaredevelopment #freshcode