Subject: Looking for a few Clojure-minded colleagues

[vlj...@yieldbot.com]

Four months ago, I started working for a young company called Yieldbot. We're using Clojure more and more, so I'm hoping to find a few new colleagues on this mailing list.

Yieldbot is an advertising technology company. I disregarded them at first, thinking it's a boring application area. But I happened to talk to one of the founders a few months ago, and there turned out to be a lot of overlap with things that I'm interested in. The business side turned out to be really interesting also.

Yieldbot has solved the riddle of targeting display ads---not by using a third-party cookie to track users across sites, but by being smart about inferring the user's intent from the contents of the page he's visiting combined with the referring page and domain. So there is lots of interesting data science going on. That's where Clojure first took hold at Yieldbot. Soren MacBeth gave a talk at Clojure/West this year about how we use Clojure for data science [1].

Now we're starting to use Clojure for many other things as well. We already have a couple of user interfaces based on ClojureScript and Om. We are transitioning our configuration database to Datomic (another Rich Hickey project). As a final example, I'm currently rewriting the service that must find potential ads for each web page served by our partner publishers. We have about 20 ms to decide which ads to serve so as to maximize profits. Our business is growing so quickly that we're having some really fun scalability challenges in this area. The Clojure solution will be faster, easier to modify (as we continue to change what we precompute and what we compute on the fly), and easier to integrate with the online machine learning that tries to make optimal ad choices.

Yieldbot got Series B funding about a year ago. We have just over 20 engineers, most of us in Maynard, Mass., a few in Portland, Ore., and some elsewhere. Including non-engineers, we are about 85 now; but in spite of growing into a "real" company, Yieldbot is still a fun startup. I'm coming to the meetup on Thursday, so I'll be happy to chat then.

Thanks,

Vebjorn

[1] https://www.yieldbot.com/blog/data-science-in-clojure-at-yieldbot/