
Nubank acquires Cognitect - zrkrlc
https://cognitect.com/blog/2020/07/23/Cognitect-Joins-Nubank
======
tom_b
Congratulations to Cognitect. Hopefully the acquisition will help Rich's
retirement funding. (see 'History of Clojure' for the not-so-insider joke
here)

I have had the pleasure of "using Clojure in anger" and for a few years was
very dedicated to learning how to use it effectively. This was a significant
step up for my general programming skills and the simplicity of the language
often saved me from myself with respect to bad design or choices in code.
Whatever programmer "maturity" I can claim is probably due to Clojure and
teaching introductory programming and databases (not with Clojure and Datomic
to be clear).

This acquisition is more abstractly interesting to me in that a _VERY_
dedicated Clojure/Datomic company made it. We didn't see here, for lack of a
better example, a FAANG company grabbing Cognitect. That may have been a
choice! Maybe Cognitect went with an acquisition where they retain a high
degree of autonomy with the benefits of being acquired.

I never made the leap into a larger organization with Clojure at its core. I
was able to use Clojure only in my small shop where I have a small degree of
autonomy on development language choice. For a few years, I was somewhat
actively seeking an opportunity to join a larger Clojure-oriented team but
struggled to gain much traction when applying to openings. It seems possible
to build a Clojure career, but I've not been very good at that.

~~~
keeganpoppen
(for anyone who doesn't get it, Rich funded Clojure development via his
retirement savings from 2005 until he ran out in 2009
[https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3386321](https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3386321))

~~~
swyx
gotta ask - what did he do after 2009? is he alright now?

~~~
dkersten
He did a community drive in 2009/2010 or so and a lot of us pitched in a
little. Then he joined forces with Relevance to create Cognitect and that has
funded his Clojure development since. Hopefully he gets a nice payday from
this acquisition too.

------
dgb23
Nubank has a very inspiring story, both for engineers that are fans of Clojure
& Datomic and for entrepreneurs that want to do "crazy" things like entering
the bank sector.

This must be very validating and exciting for both Cognitect and Nubank.

I'm excited of the future impact on Clojure and Datomic. I get the impression
that _all_[0] involved parties deeply care about what made them great so far.

[0] I'm getting that vibe based on some talks I saw of Lucas Cavalcanti and
Edward Wible, available on Youtube.

~~~
jonahbenton
Yeah, I saw the Nubank folks present in person in NYC just prior to COVID. I
am a Clojure fan, to be sure, and also a banking/money dweeb. Soup to nuts it
was one of the most impressive presentations / achievements I have seen. They
were clearly operating in the future. Congrats to both and looking forward to
growing the community.

Plans to release a SAAS banking core in the US? Pretty please?

~~~
ru552
Was this a conference? Possible link to the talk mentioned?

~~~
jonahbenton
Clojure NYC meetup, sounds like video may be damaged but was salvaged:

[https://www.meetup.com/Clojure-
nyc/events/268460200/](https://www.meetup.com/Clojure-nyc/events/268460200/)

~~~
setr
direct link to the video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dW4V3stFX0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dW4V3stFX0)

------
rafaelferreira
Nubank’s co-founder and CTO offers his perspective:
[https://building.nubank.com.br/welcoming-cognitect-
nubank/](https://building.nubank.com.br/welcoming-cognitect-nubank/)

~~~
kbuchanan
He makes mention of 2,300 Datomic databases. Can anyone shed some light on how
a company maintains (or requires?)... 2,300 databases? What business needs
lead to something like this? What kind of reporting pipeline possibly could
pull so many dbs with cross concerns together under one roof?

~~~
thiagocesar
Brazilian tax law, Brazilian financial regulation, Brazilian fraud
prevention...

Things get byzantine fast in Brazil.

------
jwr
My entire business is built on Clojure and ClojureScript, and it would not
have been possible without these languages. I am always slightly worried by
this kind of news, because it means that the main Clojure team is now
dependent on a single institution. But it could be good news as well,
depending on how things go.

Until now, I've been getting nothing but excellence from the Clojure team: not
just great tools, but also great thinking behind them. I appreciate what I've
gotten (for free!) until now, and hope that the trend will continue :-)

~~~
riku_iki
> it would not have been possible without these languages

What critical features Clojure has, which don't exist in other
platforms/languages?

~~~
dustingetz
Lisp + immutability is the right foundation for symbolic/logic programming,
datalog, declarative programming, graph programming. None of this is really
feasible in other langs due to bad ergonomics and no coordinated ecosystem
buyin. Haskell lacks platform portability and Scala 2 is just too complicated
to think clearly about anything high level.

~~~
sitkack
Take a look at Elixir, it has metaprogramming and immutability while gaining
the robustness and distribution that the Beam (Erlang VM) gives you.

~~~
andrenth
For the Beam there’s also Clojerl
[https://github.com/clojerl/clojerl](https://github.com/clojerl/clojerl)

~~~
sitkack
I am astounded by the abundance of languages on the Beam, Gleam, LFE, Purerl,
Lua and possibly many more.

Have you seen Lumen, a Beam implementation in Rust that targets Wasm?

[https://github.com/lumen/lumen](https://github.com/lumen/lumen)

~~~
andrenth
I had heard of it but never tried to use it.

I hope at least some of those languages get enough adoption to become viable
production choices. I feel, apart from Elixir, Gleam has the most “popularity
potential” right now.

~~~
sitkack
The nice thing is that they all speak Erlang terms so you can mix and match
them. Beam is such a wonderful VM!

------
scribu
Did anyone else notice that the biggest non-academic supporters of functional
programming seem to be financial institutions?

Is it due to the nature of the problem space? Is it because finance people
tend to be more analytical? Something else?

~~~
orolle
It is nature of the problem space which requires you to produce high quality
code. If you have a small error in your program, the financial market
participants will use it against you to profit. What you loose, others win!
Google "fat finger" for examples. In banking you have to keep track of every
transactions, see "double accounting". You never delete a transaction, you
only retract! Mutablity can cause you a lot of trouble there. SQL DELETE and
UPDATE are extremly dangerous! Clojure and datomic solves this through
immutibilty. Lastly time is relativistic, meaning that every IT system has a
slightly different time. Normaly you never notice this. But they are the cause
of tricky race conditions and cost you real money. Think about bank
transactions, where you have a transaction date (date you send money) and
valuta date (date your friend receives money). One transaction 2 different
dates, depending which perspective you take (perspective is relativistic,
Einstein is right even in IT!). Datomic linerialies transactions thus this
problem does not occure on database level.

~~~
hk__2
> It is nature of the problem space which requires you to produce high quality
> code.

Wouldn’t a strongly-typed language be a better choice here?

~~~
maximente
this is perhaps controversial but i actually think datomic is so powerful,
it's worth using clojure for. in other words, the database is driving the
choice of programming language.

the idea of viewing a database as an _immutable_ state of the world at a given
instant t0, and time becoming a parameter on that state of the world (in order
to show changes as time goes forwards [or backwards!]), is extremely,
extremely attractive for things like finance, whose first class citizens are
among others:

\- capability for audits e.g. show me the history of transactions from any
particular account. since datomic is basically a collection of immutable facts
over time, this is "free"

\- distributed computing - datomic runs nicely across your own internal
compute (often needed for financial stuff)

\- transactions are no longer strings, but are actual data structures - this
makes the gnarly steps of things like transferring assets across instruments a
lot easier (i'd imagine). think about how you'd implement a shopping cart with
transactions in postgres vs. how you'd do it with access to raw data
structures

~~~
fnordsensei
Moreover, transactions are reified and can have arbitrary metadata, so you can
query the transaction log itself (for example, "show me all transactions
issued by person X").

------
juskrey
Pretty strange how no one else sees that banks are very very fragile
institutions, plus this one is heavily VC-ed, which makes everything they
claim in public irrelevant (this is if we want to trust what any bank says at
all).

What is relevant is that Cognitect will now have 100% of income coming from
the single (and fragile) source, they now do not have to compete and survive
on their own, they can't say "no" when having a choice between having to
conform or quit the only money source.

I am not discussing personalities here - people are free to choose how to sell
their products or themselves. Just thinking what this means to me as a
software consultant who makes 100% of money from Clojure (yes, a fragile
single choice because of sort of falling in love)

~~~
whoisjuan
How is a bank a fragile institution? Banks are the most heavily insured and
protected institutions in any modern country.

In the US for example, banks not only contribute to federal insurance but also
have built joint private reserves to weather economic turmoil. In the modern
world banks rarely go bankrupt because if they did that would tank any
confidence in the economy and create incredible chaos.

Even in failed states like Venezuela banks are still a major pillar of economy
confidence.

~~~
juskrey
This is simply false - banks are not insured against failure and not protected
unless some political move "too big to fail" is made, and this only makes
systemic financial system failures worse.

~~~
whoisjuan
> Banks are not insured against failure and not protected.

Well. Except they are. In the US not only at the federal level but also at the
state level:

\-
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deposit_insurance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deposit_insurance)

\- [https://www.fdic.gov/deposit/](https://www.fdic.gov/deposit/)

\-
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Deposit_Insurance_Corp...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Deposit_Insurance_Corporation)

\- [https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/17/business/bank-earnings-
defaul...](https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/17/business/bank-earnings-defaults-
recession/index.html)

~~~
cemerick
You are mistaking what is insured here. _Deposits_ are insured, the banks
themselves are not.

Here's the list of banks that have failed in the US and for which their
deposits entered receivership managed by the FDIC; looks like a handful every
year:
[https://www.fdic.gov/Bank/individual/failed/banklist.html](https://www.fdic.gov/Bank/individual/failed/banklist.html)

~~~
whoisjuan
I'm not. I was trying to point to the OP that banks aren't as fragile as he
think they are. When the very nature of your business, which is handling
people's money, is federally insured, you have mitigated a lot of risk.

Yes banks can fail and they can go bankrupt, and if that happens to Nubank
then this acquisition goes to hell which makes the Clojure ecosystem weaker. I
give that to OP.

But saying that banks are "very very" fragile institutions I think is
fundamentally wrong.

~~~
juskrey
The fact that deposits are insured has nothing to do with bank solvency.
People just get some of the money back when the bank blows up. Arguably this
makes banks to be even more reckless and to hide more dangerous risks under
the deposit insurance claims.

And the function of the regulator is to stop and DISSOLVE the bank BEFORE it
goes potentially too deep into the pocket of deposit insurance fund in case of
running astray. So this is a social instrument but again does not solve the
institutional risk problem. Maybe, just maybe makes some banks more paranoid,
but they still blow up at very high pace.

------
mark_l_watson
Good for them, well deserved success for the principles, Clojure, and Datomic!

I donated to the Clojure dev fund early on, and I had two consulting customers
over a few year period who mandated Clojure. I stopped using Clojure when the
paid work stopped because I really like Common Lisp better for my use cases. I
have on my radar for sometime this year to update my cooking website [1] that
is written in Clojure, so I will at least get a small opportunity to kick the
tires on modern day Clojure.

[1] [http://cookingspace.com](http://cookingspace.com)

------
rel2thr
Wonder if this makes datomic more likely to become free/open source

Not sure what their license revenue is but hard to imagine it would be
significant to a major fintech

~~~
kamaal
Also lets hope they acquire cursive ide too and offer it for free.

Clojure deserves an IDE for larger adoption.

~~~
puredanger
Clojure has many free IDEs. Many people currently use Emacs w/CIDER, Atom
w/Chlorine, Visual Studio w/Calva, Vim w/Fireplace, etc. For that matter,
Cursive also has a free non-commercial edition.

~~~
jcadam
I've found CIDER superior to Cursive for Clojurescript, specifically. I use a
combination of IntelliJ (with the emacs keybindings) and emacs depending on
which language I'm working with. Most of my projects involve two or more
languages, so I'll usually have both editors open all day :)

As an aside, I'm starting to become a fan of Kotlin for backends (with some
Clojure sprinkled in where it offers a big advantage), and Clojurescript (re-
frame) for the frontend (because it offers a big win over javascript there).
I've taken a step back from full Clojure for everything, being that I have to
work with others who aren't as in to "alternative" languages as I am.

Datomic is something I probably won't mess with until (and if) it becomes open
source.

~~~
KingMob
Funny, I _left_ Cider for Cursive a few years ago, because back then, Cursive
had the better cljs support.

~~~
jcadam
It's probably a result of my using shadow-cljs rather than figwheel. Cursive
will catch up eventually, I'm sure.

------
tomconnors
It sounds like Nubank might have the biggest Datomic installation in the world
(2000 servers). This is exciting news for people like me who think Datomic is
the most interesting database out there. Putting more resources behind Datomic
might finally allow it to go mainstream.

~~~
tom_b
I was unable to bring Datomic in-house. Mainly because our organization has a
huge agreement with Oracle and all our database servers are essentially "free"
to teams.

So I cheated. I created some schema designs that were immutable. I added a
GUID, timestamp, and a deleted flag (value of 'Y' or 'N') to tables.
Basically, all selects are against views that are defined over the tables to
select the tuple associated with the max(timestamp) for that tuple along with
the tuple having a deleted flag value of 'N'. This means that any select only
sees the most recent tuple value for a GUID if it hasn't been "deleted".

There was a little bit more hiding in there to handle dirty writes.

But this worked very well for my requirements. By really only doing inserts, I
was able to do similar "point in time" looks at the db as an immutable value.

Fun stuff.

~~~
escherize
Reminds me of the time I wrote an eavt (entity, attribute, value, transaction-
time) store on top of rethink db with a friend of mine.

------
dustingetz
The bull case here is if Nubank goes full Amazon and uses banking as a
beachhead to create the next layer up from AWS, which Clojure/Datomic is
amazingly perfect for – data all the things

~~~
adamtait
Ha! I was going to reply to this comment - "If you're interested in data-all-
the-things, then you should take a look at Hyperfiddle" \- until I recognized
the user handle and realized that you already knew about Hyperfiddle. (for
those reading along, dustingetz built Hyperfiddle)

~~~
dustingetz
still building! we killed the saas thing for now and are releasing a web
framework soon - declarative crud apps from nothing but function defs, specs,
and datomic! All IO is managed and composes like Datomic Peer fns compose.
Userland has no async, error handling etc. Complex pickers with typeahead
search, query params etc are declared in one LOC

------
ramon
Nubank is one of the biggest startups in Brazil and I am a Nubank customer and
I must say they have the best service available. Treating customers as
customers.

~~~
afefers
The customer support is the best! No waiting, no pre-recorded messages, no
muzak, no menu. A real person picks the phone and talks to you. Oh and the app
is a delight!

------
stopachka
Congratulations team! I remember watching the Nubank infoq talk, and sensing
that they have a serious hacker culture.

This could be great for the clojure community. One idea, if done, could step
function the community: open source datomic... Oh ma gad if that happens!

------
auganov
> Nubank has grown to 600 Clojure developers, running 2.5 million lines of
> Clojure code in 500 microservices

Wow, that's enormous especially for a concise language like Clojure. Very
happy about this announcement as a Clojure user. Sounds like it's going to be
viable for at least another decade.

------
hellofunk
Case you’re curious, Nubank has done the same thing for the Elixir language!

[http://blog.plataformatec.com.br/2020/01/important-
informati...](http://blog.plataformatec.com.br/2020/01/important-information-
about-our-elixir-and-ruby-open-source-projects/)

~~~
rafaelferreira
Not exactly, Elixir continues to be lead by José Valim, now at Dashbit.
(disclosure: nubank employee).

------
fulafel
Apparently Nubank has offices in Berlin, wonder if at some point there could
be jobs there for working on open source Clojure things.

------
systems
Since Nubank, is not in the business of selling software does this mean, they
might open source datomic ?

------
andrenth
Are there any technical posts from Nubank on how they manage such a large
Clojure codebase (I guess it must be Clojure's largest user in the industry).

I'm looking for things like how to refactor safely in the absence of static
typing, for example. Do they make use of spec?

I'm a big fan of static typing, but when using a dynamic language with
immutable values and pattern matching, like Erlang, I don't miss it that much.
Maybe with Clojure is the same?

~~~
hcarvalhoalves
Not sure we have any talks about that specifically, but what I can say is that
on the Clojure codebases:

\- We rely heavily on testing (unit tests, property-based/generative and
integration)

\- We adopt a micro-services architecture, so most codebases are small enough
that refactoring is easy, or sometimes we just replace the service altogether

\- We leverage Schema
([https://github.com/plumatic/schema](https://github.com/plumatic/schema))
and/or clojure.spec
([https://clojure.org/guides/spec](https://clojure.org/guides/spec)) to
annotate functions and data schemas, but it's opt-in

\- We have static checking of data schemas across boundaries (e.g. checking
data producers did not break consumers over HTTP or Kafka), which is where we
found the most value (replaced complicated end-to-end tests)

~~~
stopachka
Curious, did you really find that microservices helped?

The downsides can be so tremendous -- I wonder if nubank would have done
better to services in the low digit range.

(context: my thoughts on it ->
[https://stopa.io/post/236](https://stopa.io/post/236))

~~~
hcarvalhoalves
I believe micro-services change the trade-offs, and it's a matter of what you
value more.

We certainly have to invest more on infra-structure, monitoring,
standardisation, and we have been doing since day one - by now it's pretty
robust, to the point our internal tooling allowed us to migrate from raw EC2
to kubernetes ([https://www.cncf.io/case-
study/nubank/](https://www.cncf.io/case-study/nubank/)) and it was a
transparent change to all services and teams.

On the other hand, failures are more localised and we gain robustness and
speed to do certain kind of changes.

Your point about getting domain boundaries wrong is true, but IMO it's a pain
orthogonal to micro-services. The solution is the same as if you defined a
sub-optimal class interface on a big mono-repo: relentless refactoring. We are
often strangling
([https://martinfowler.com/bliki/StranglerFigApplication.html](https://martinfowler.com/bliki/StranglerFigApplication.html))
and replacing legacy services.

------
praveenperera
First plataformatec (company behind elixir) now this. Interesting.

~~~
samtechie
It was more of an aquahire and Jose Valim the creator of Elixir left
Plataformatec to start his own consultancy. All assets related to Elixir were
transferred to the community. The rest of the core contributors are not
affiliated to Plataformatec therefore the acquisition had no effect on Elixir.

------
nt591
Nubank also acquired Plataformatec and the Elixir team. Very interested to
watch how this plays out.

~~~
Plugawy
Not quite: they acquired the __consulting __part of Plataformatec, the core
Elixir folks are running a new
venture:[https://changelog.com/podcast/402](https://changelog.com/podcast/402)

------
bhurlow
I'm just remembering the sad collapse of RethinkDB...

The task of making a viable commercial database in 2020 is herculean and I can
really empathize with the team's need to both keep cashflow and have a
sufficiently sized deployment to debug against.

Can also say that everyone I've met at nubank are really passionate about the
ecosystem and seem like they'll be excellent partners

~~~
fulafel
Datomic is 8+ years old and by all accounts has a healthy customer base, it's
not like they are in the takeoff stage. But of course they have to keep up
like everyone else, especially now that there is competition from the OSS side
(Crux).

------
unexaminedlife
"Explicitly constraining and mitigating certain categories of complexity was
likely to pay off in the medium and long term."

100 million % correct. It boggles my mind when I am hired onto projects to
help "bring them to prod" only to find out the past several years the coding
was primarily done by college grads and relative beginners.

Ideally you get to rely on experts for the entirety of a project, but if your
budget doesn't allow for it, at minimum I think it's early in the project that
you want EXPERTS. You don't bring in experts and expect miracles after all the
bad decisions have already been made and committed to.

------
sidcool
I am genuinely curious. I haven't heard the name Cognitect before. I checked
the website and they seem like another software consultancy firm. Anything I
am missing? HN is very picky, so they must be doing something special.

~~~
hvis
This is the company that employs Rich Hickey and most of (all?) other
maintainers of Clojure, the programming language.

~~~
sidcool
Ah. Makes sense. Thanks

------
kgraves
what does this mean for the future of clojure?

I am a bit worried that a startup has acquired two companies that have
extremely deep experience in specialised languages Platformatec (Elixir) and
now Clojure (Cognitect)

~~~
michel_dib
Disclaimer: I am a Nubank employee, so there might be bias.

Regarding the future of Clojure, I believe that not much will change actually.
Before Clojure was sponsored by Cognitect and had Rich's / Stu's and Alex's
stewardship and that's gonna continue to be the case just swapping the
sponsoring company behind it. IMHO it's only on Nubank's best interest to have
a strong community around Clojure and Datomic as well.

About Platformatec I think that was a very different thing, it was more an
acqui-hiring, and before Elxir's stewardship was under the company (but having
very different development dynamics compared to Clojure) and after the
agreement, it was transferred to the community. So the company was pretty much
dissolved after the contract, and back then, that was clear and transparent,
as it was announced to happen.

------
geokon
Does this mean Closure will continue to become more and more server/web
focused?

I could have the wrong impression, but from all the dead libraries I've come
across it feels like it used to be all over the place with people doing math,
visualizations/art, music, people trying to run on Android (seemingly the only
JVM language that has no Android ecosystem/workflow.. crazy) etc.. Now a lot
of that has atrophied and looks like it's mostly all about web. Though there
are still interesting nonweb things going on - it just feels like a shrinking
fraction

Either way, a big congrats to the people involved. Happy for you guys. That
you for all your hard work, the beautiful language that has made me enjoy
programming more than ever, and all for free :)

~~~
puredanger
I disagree that people are not doing those things now or that this has changed
at all. We have a decade of yearly Clojure surveys that show people continue
to do all those things (and lots more).

Most (70-80%) of Clojure developers work on web apps because most programmers
work on web apps.

People that like Clojure use it for everything you can think of and I expect
them to keep doing so.

------
jfbaro
I hope Nubank opens source DATOMIC... it would benefit a lot from community
work.

------
clj_throwaway
Throwaway account, for obvious reasons.

This is great for nubank, but how is this supposed to work for other users of
Clojure and Datomic? Who is really going to be interested in building on top
of tech owned by a (new, unknown, regional) bank?

Someone said that this is just like Amazon (who would build on top of tech
from a bookstore??), but I hope it's obvious the two situations are very
different.

I expect that I'll have to be looking for a new job in a year's time :-(

~~~
myth_drannon
Is it better to be owned by an adtech company (React, Angular, Go)?

~~~
clj_throwaway
If you asked me that 15 years ago, I'd say "no". In hindsight, it sort of
makes sense given their objective of increasing time spent online and the
quality of the experience.

The proposition here is that nubank will be the first bank to successfully
turn into a software vendor. Maybe my worries will be nothing in 10 years, but
no one can say its an obvious outcome.

~~~
myth_drannon
Bloomberg and Jane street (not banks but still finance). They don't own OCaml
but are heavily involved in its development.

~~~
LeonidasXIV
Bloomberg has sponsored BuckleScript in the beginning, but now it is sponsored
by Facebook. Other than that their influence on OCaml development is minimal
(and technically BuckleScript is a fork of the OCaml compiler).

------
huahaiy
Congratulations! Does this mean that there is a chance for Datomic to be open
sourced?

------
dbancajas
can one make a career out of clojure?

~~~
tom_b
I think this a much more nuanced question than a yes-or-no answer can cover.

Looking at LinkedIn or indeed.com with just a simple search for Clojure with
no geographic qualifier (in the US), we see a very small number of listed
openings - 252 over the last month at LinkedIn or 44 in the last 14 days at
indeed. A plain google job search on Clojure jobs in the US returns an even
smaller number.

Some of those job listings will almost certainly have Clojure listed as part
of a "laundry list" of technologies and the actual job will probably not be
Clojure oriented.

So just from a raw numbers perspective, the job sites to suggest that there
aren't a huge number of opportunities. Comparatively speaking, there are like
60,000 Java job postings on LinkedIn in the last month.

However, if you attend a Clojure/conj (one of the "primary" Clojure
programming conferences), you will find that many attendees are part of some
(not super-large?) number of companies that use Clojure.

My best advice on building a Clojure career (that I failed to follow) is that
a programmer who wants to make a Clojure career path is to be prepared to
spend a significant amount of time trying to make connections inside the
Clojure community. On top of that, you probably need to build a portfolio of
project experience that you at minimum blog about and preferably speak at
Clojure conferences, user groups, or meetups.

<edit: removed off-topic thought>

I would gently observe that long-time Clojure developers are maybe too close
to the tree to see the forest when it comes to judging Clojure career
opportunities.

But I would love to be wrong about my impression of Clojure job opportunities!
Perhaps fellow-HN readers could post (anonymous?) numbers of Clojure job
openings for their company to give us a better idea?

~~~
beders
I replied to a posting on Clojurians #remote-work slack channel and had my
first Clojure/ClojureScript job within a week. That was just awesome!

------
ksec
I thought Nubank was an Elixir Shop but now It looks like Nubank is a much
bigger Clojure shop than Elixir.

So why did they acquire Plataformatec?

~~~
kureikain
They are a big Clojure shop. They hire Plataformatec as a consulting company.
This podcast has more info:
[https://changelog.com/podcast/402](https://changelog.com/podcast/402)

~~~
riadvargas
We (Nubank) actually acqui-hired Plataformatec earlier this year:
[https://www.contxto.com/en/startups/fintech-nubank-acqui-
hir...](https://www.contxto.com/en/startups/fintech-nubank-acqui-hires-
plataformatec-team-engineers/)

------
josefrichter
Killer team.

------
sandGorgon
AWS has Quantum Ledger DB, which is a lot like what nubank architected on top
of datomic.

Anyone know what language qldb is built on ?

~~~
JBiserkov
I believe the intersection of use cases for QLDB and Datomic is the empty set.

------
zeendo
It sure would be funny if Nubank was the company from Neal Ford's story about
someone sneaking Clojure into an enterprise years ago by claiming it was "just
a Java library".

I doubt it is but would be a pretty funny tie in.

~~~
moocowtruck
i actually did this at a large enterprise, when i left the person taking up my
mantle asked 'so this is just java right' I said 'uh ya you just include the
jar and write the code like this' :D

------
ncmncm
I encountered a surprising remark recently: someone said they had no interest
in Clojure because it is proprietary.

In what way is it proprietary? Do Clojure programs depend on a runtime
distributed with a restrictive license?

~~~
puredanger
It's not proprietary. Clojure is under the EPL 1.0 (Eclipse Public License),
which is intended to be a business-friendly copy-left license.

------
gdsdfe
Anyone have an idea on the nubank stack in a bit more details?

~~~
riadvargas
Here you can get a somewhat updated view on Nubank's stack:
[https://stackshare.io/nubank/nubank](https://stackshare.io/nubank/nubank)

~~~
gdsdfe
Yeah thanks I saw this page ... I was just trying to understand the
Plataformatec acquisition and how it fits in the stack

------
namelosw
Wow, congratulations!

I wonder, would this lead to open source Datomic in one day?

------
jacknews
Will the license change?

~~~
puredanger
No change in Clojure's license (it is still EPL 1.0).

------
jyriand
What is meant by "joining"? Did Nubank aquire Cognitec?

~~~
josefrichter
yes

------
jacobsmith1984
Now there is a conflict of interest in Cognitect cloud services. Would you
trust a bank watch over your strategic information?

~~~
vemv
Their Cloud offering is provided as a template, they're not a SaaS/IaaS

[https://docs.datomic.com/cloud/getting-started/start-
system....](https://docs.datomic.com/cloud/getting-started/start-system.html)

------
PaulHoule
Why don't they take on the name Cognitect? It is a much better brand than
Nubank and that would distinguish this from the many stories where a no brand
or bad brand big co buys a good brand.

~~~
positr0n
Nubank has over ten million customers and undoubtedly many more people in
their target market that know their brand. The only people that would
recognize Cognitect are clojure developers or particularly hardcore fans.

------
Ericson2314
> From their start in 2013, Nubank has grown to 600 Clojure developers,
> running 2.5 million lines of Clojure code in 500 microservices on over 2000
> Datomic servers.

Yikes that sounds like hell. Let's stop bragging about costs as a succeess
store? Headcount? LoC? microservices? These are all to be _minimized_.

~~~
puredanger
Edward Wible, CTO at Nubank, actually makes this comparison to other banks
(and how small it is) at
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cYYwxgaxB0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cYYwxgaxB0)
(in the first few minutes).

