Introductions

[Mark Champine]

I think it would be fun for our Boston Clojure Group members to learn a bit a about each other. 

What's your personal and professional background? What brings you to Clojure? What have you done with Clojure, or want to do with it?  I'll Start!

Personal: Married, 3 kids in college. After living in the 'burbs north & west of Boston for the last 20+ years, I've recently moved to Somerville near Porter Sq.  Loving city life! Bike to work, walk to shops and restaurants. Very fun.

Professional: Security Architect at Akamai - with oversight for secure web application development of our web portal.

Coming to Clojure: After decades as an imperative OO programmer (mostly Algol Family - C, C++, Java) I stumbled across Clojure pre-1.0 and have been following its progress ever since. I'd never done functional programming, and so I discovered an entirely new (to me) world of programming.  I watched some videos by Rich, the Stuarts, read some books, dug into SICP, and found I was really enjoying programming again as I discovered the power of working with data directly via map, reduce, filter, etc.  Lambdas, partial application, closures, recursion, immutability, laziness, memoization, functional composition - it was a whole new world for me! It was real hurdle to shift my instinctual approach to solving problems from loop&mutate to reducing a sequence. Some of the practice sites like 4clojure and the project Euler were very helpful for that. From there I even dug into the Lambda Calculus, Y-Combinator, and Monads - though I'm certainly not done with understanding those things.

Using Clojure: I've used it for tools and utilities at work - REST clients and XML processing, but not live in production. I have a number of personal projects in various states of completeness that I work on as time allows. Overall, I'd say I'm still an intermediate Clojure programmer. I have pretty extensive knowledge of what libraries, frameworks, and tools are out there - but since I don't get to use Clojure on a daily basis, I'm still rely heavily on the web for examples and code snippets.  But I do find Clojure the most enjoyable and productive language I've ever used, so I'm it for the long haul!

I hope you will introduce yourself here as well. See you at the Meetup!

Mark

[Andy Chambers]

Hi Mark,

Sounds like a nice idea! I've been meaning to come to a Clojure meetup for months but

I keep missing them for one reason or another. I plan on coming to the one on Thursday

though. See you then.

Personal:

  I recently moved to the Boston area from Scotland. I live in Somerville with my

  and am enjoying this great city that has programming meetups for crazy languages

  like clojure.

Professional:

  For the day job, I do Ruby on Rails at PayPal. We maintain a web app used by

  our own folks to create targeted offers/incentives for businesses to use PayPal

  and find people who might 

Coming to Clojure:

  I came to Lisp in general before clojure. I'd seen it mentioned in various places

  across the internet but like many people when I read Paul Graham's essay, I went out

  and bought Peter Seibel's Practical Common Lisp and fell in love with the REPL. I

  was pretty slow to adopt clojure since then because I didn't have a bunch of Java

  code that I wanted to script but since then I've realized that it brings many

  other features to the table in addition to it's great interop with Java.

Using Clojure:

  I tool around with a variety of things, most of which are tangentially related to

  whatever work I'm doing or have recently done. Right now, I'm finding datomic,

  Om, and Prismatic's Schema very interesting.

[Robert Herrmann]

Hi.  I'm a professional software developer always looking to level up.     After listening to Neal Ford, etc... I've decided to give clojure some brain space.

I tend to work as an independent software consultant, and I'm looking for clojure projects that need help.

Cheers

-bob