
Building a credit card issuer in Brazil using Clojure and Datomic (2014) [video] - espeed
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lm3K8zVOdY
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hcarvalhoalves
Disclaimer: I work at Nubank, nice to see it posted here. This video is now
one year old and it's nice to see how the technology choices at the start are
still paying dividends.

Datomic in particular is a pretty smart product backed by solid concepts
(RDFs/triplestores, event sourcing, immutability, querying engine on the
client side, datalog), something companies end up re-inventing in-house
further down the line, so it's nice to be aware of the architecture even if
not intending to use it.

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goldfeld
I'm brazilian and have been working with Clojure for a few years and used
Datomic on a project earlier this year. Are you planning on hiring? Sorry for
the thread hijack.

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hcarvalhoalves
Cool! We are always hiring - you can see current open positions here:
[https://nubank.workable.com/](https://nubank.workable.com/)

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psidium
Been using NuBank for about 8 months and I must say, it is the best bank
experience I've ever had. They put great effort into every aspect of their
business. From the mobile app to the customer experience, it's perfect! (Now
that I've promoted you please raise my limit amount - haha jk)

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johansch
Is it about more than than a web frontend?

Also: 47 upvotes before my (first) comment is.. weird. Content spam?

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hellbanner
Up votes on content without comments aren't unusual if the reader likes the
link or wants more people to see it. Could be spam, of course :)

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tim333
Also with 40 min videos some people feel they should watch the thing before
commenting which delays stuff.

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nodesocket
Interesting video and concepts with Datomic, but a few questions.

* Why did Nubank decide to attack the Brazil market instead of US? There have been attempts here in the US; Simple ([https://www.simple.com](https://www.simple.com)), Standard Treasury ([http://standardtreasury.com/](http://standardtreasury.com/)), Final ([https://getfinal.com/](https://getfinal.com/)), and Coin ([https://onlycoin.com/](https://onlycoin.com/)).

* Isn't reinventing the engineering wheel; in terms of Datomic and a not popular language like Clojure a potential huge distraction to the ultimate goal of building a bank? The problem space is big and hard enough without rolling/maintaining/testing your own database engine and obscure language framework.

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hcarvalhoalves
I'll try to address:

* Perhaps surprising, but Brazil is an interesting market. We have a connected young generation and most industries' current players are bad.

* I would argue it's about _avoiding_ reinventing the wheel. Datomic gives you easy scale-out and auditing, and Clojure gives you a flexible, pragmatic functional language with good async/threading primitives running on stablished platforms (JVM and web browsers). I guess going off the beaten path is not necessarily more work if you're taking a shortcut.

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andrewchambers
Datomic seemed like an amazing choice for banks to me.

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fabioyy
they are a credit card issuer ( mastercard brand ). not a bank.

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dang
Ok, we s/bank/credit card issuer/'d the title.

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patkai
Datomic sounds really awsome, I'm wondering which other dbms' can it be
related to? (assuming there is nothing new under the sun :) )

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hcarvalhoalves
I'm not aware of any, although I'm not sure Datomic qualifies as a traditional
DBMS. It's more like a querying API + a master process (transactor) backed by
a traditional store/DB (Postgres, Dynamo, etc), so you can achieve the same by
putting some existing solutions together, but it's implementing a bit more
than a DBMS alone.

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fiatjaf
This is not a bank and you know it.

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alecco
Why would you use a slow un-benchmarkable database? There are plenty of good
DBs out there for this job.

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andrewchambers
I don't know any other db that lets you put arbitrary constraints in
transactions and run queries as if you were in the past.

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trurl
LogicBlox.

