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Ask HN: Who's using Clojure, and to do what?
109 points by udkl on May 9, 2017 | hide | past | favorite | 49 comments
Who's using Clojure in production today and what are you using it for? I'm curious about the state of the ecosystem and its adoption today. There are a lot of old threads (on HN[1] or Quora[2]) that ask this - but none of them seem to reflect latest on who's using Clojure in production in 2017.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/#!/story/forever/0/whos%20using%20clojure

[2] https://www.quora.com/Whos-using-Clojure-in-production

Ask HN post from 2014 : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8549823




Some talks from the last year:

Ladder (life insurance) - https://youtu.be/qijWBPYkRAQ

Apex Data Solutions - https://youtu.be/wR2kYn-7ijQ

Sandia National Labs (research lab) - https://youtu.be/RB65-zYLNSY

Cisco - https://youtu.be/8rRzESy0X2k

DataStax - https://youtu.be/wfrajaEyNX0

Audyx (web-based sonograms) - https://youtu.be/K6ZoF3CHsa0

Latacora (crypto) -https://youtu.be/Lf-M1ZH6KME

Nubank (banking) - https://youtu.be/aw6y4r4NAlw

HCA (healthcare) - https://youtu.be/OxUHgP4Ox5Q

Center for Mathematical Sciences at Cambridge - https://youtu.be/-NebRpbMTK8

Zimpler (payments) - https://youtu.be/s0QG3QCV1LY


Our API Banking team uses Clojure to power production public-facing APIs at Silicon Valley Bank (http://docs.svbplatform.com). Great fit for our use case; we can leverage lots of existing banking-related Java libraries while still writing clean, concise, and functional code.

We have a hackathon coming up on June 15 in SF and we'd love to find even just one Clojurist who wants to attend to make it worth our while to build out a clojure SDK :P Contact mclarke@svb.com if you're interested in more info.

(we are also hiring)


Haven't worked on Clojure for a few years but would love to know more details about your Hackathon


Is it open for remote candidates?


Metabase's backend is written entirely in Clojure. http://www.metabase.com/

[EDIT] And yes, open source: https://github.com/metabase/metabase

Also, we're hiring :) http://www.metabase.com/jobs/ (frontend as well, which is JS/React/Redux, not ClojureScript... yet)


Plus, the codebase is open-source: https://github.com/metabase/metabase


At Stylitics, we use Clojure & ClojureScript to automate building outfits from retailers' product catalogs, arranging them in a visually appealing collage image, serving those to their product pages and track engagement & other analytics.

Biggest wins for me:

1. Reagent - building UIs has never been easier for me

2. Figwheel - I know hot-reload can be had with other tools & languages, but it's so nice to have and especially when integrated with your REPL

3. Concurrency - lots to say here, but coming from Ruby, literally just `pmap` alone is awesome, haha.

4. Deploying an uberjar is easy

5. compojure-api is a great way to build documented, live API docs/explorers

6. integrant (or component) for building up & managing running systems out of interdependent parts

That stuff's pretty basic but it's been a boon. There's a lot more cool stuff that we've used in the past and/or hope to use in the future - core.logic or constraint programming libraries for implementing rules & constraints, core.async for various things (trying to be more judicious but it's definitely useful), onyx for building distributed computation flows.

The biggest side benefit of working in Clojure, in my opinion, is training your mind to think data-first and simplicity-first. This is kind of cliché, but I've found it to be true and I feel like if I had to leave Clojure I'd be more equipped than when I started to work with the types of systems the future will need. But I'm hoping to stay :)


OpinionLab has used Clojure in production since early 2014 for microservices, ETL processes, analysis tasks and machine learning projects.  We have a small and enthusiastic team of polyglot Clojure developers and a weekly Clojure study group, and are interested in growing that team. If that sounds interesting and you live in the Chicago area, please do say hello at clojure@opinionlab.com.


Akvo http://akvo.org (Akvo is a not-for-profit foundation that creates open source, internet and mobile software and sensors.) On various projects (https://github.com/akvo/akvo-lumen, https://github.com/akvo/akvo-flow-api, https://github.com/akvo/akvo-flow-services).


Using clojure to provide extinction risk assessments for Brazilian flora biodiversity, in a pipeline of data gathering, cleaning and geospatial analysis.

https://biodivdev.github.io

Also, on the Clojure website there are featured stories and a list of companies using it:

https://clojure.org/community/success_stories https://clojure.org/community/companies


Lots of examples:

Companies - https://clojure.org/community/companies

Success stories - https://clojure.org/community/success_stories

Community stories (interview style) - https://clojure.org/community/community_stories


Pretty sure Clubhouse https://clubhouse.io has their backend in Clojure


Totally! And their frontend from what I know.


IIRC from my conversation with their founder, the front-end is still pure js.


SMX, (http://smxemail.com) in Auckland, New Zealand. We're an email security / email hosting provider and have been using Clojure for 5ish years.

We use Clojure for our custom big data platform, Clojurescript for our DLP rules engine embedded in the mail flow (via SpiderMonkey) and our new ISP portal.


I'm using it at work (small design studio) for frontend development, when appropriate. Also for small side projects I want to exist. eg. quick tumblr image search http://poyo.co/tumblr/ (shift-submit for username, "g" changes grid layout)

Just started using garden for css - having an actual language to generate css, along with namespaces is a boon and I wish I'd started sooner.

Boot, cljs, garden and, depending on project, clojure on the serverside too. Sharing reagent components w/ hiccup for serverside rendering using cljc (cljs / clj shared files) works quite well. There's a little you you have to replicate at the top level of components to pass data down, but reader conditionals can get you quite far.


Credit Suisse has a major part of their Risk system written in Clojure and ClojureScript.


My team in ViaSat's Irish office use Clojure, mostly for the testing infrastructure (Clojure's generative testing tools are incredibly useful for us), although we foresee it being used a lot more for upcoming projects.

We're also hiring :)


My (ex-)team at https://www.goopti.com used Clojure for the entire data infrastructure, all the machine learning and exploratory data science.

I've given a couple of talks about our experience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GLXmGeuoOU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtmggfGD3RQ&index=6&list=PLe...


I wrote about my experience at an NLP startup that used Clojure, and my blog post was discussed on Hacker News here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10662128

My blog post doesn't go into architectural details, but our architecture was nearly the same as that described by Matthias Nehlsen here:

http://matthiasnehlsen.com/blog/2014/11/07/Building-Systems-...


I learned clojure to use it with Datomic, which built an audit trail of every operation on the database.

I really enjoyed using clojure, I felt it boosted productivity but it also came with a huge learning curve. However, overtime, I found that I could map my thoughts to clojure a lot more easier than with other languages like Javascript and Python.

However, I fear that the rarity of clojure developers also means paying a premium. ES6 also makes it hard to leave the Javascript ecosystem.

For financial startups with money, clojure and datomic will be the go to stack. Maybe I'll open source the luminus project I built for a small bank.


the payment and data integration services of instadeq[1] are implemented in clojure (component, immutant, bidi, cheshire).

also the data integration backend (same stack as above), and it's frontend and an admin interface for users, groups and permissions for event fabric[2] (clojurescript, om.next, garden).

just to be clear, backend and frontend of both product aren't clojure/clojurescript.

[1] https://instadeq.com/ [2] https://event-fabric.com/


Distributed Masonry uses Clojure to build Onyx [1], an open source distributed batch and streaming platform. We also build a realtime application platform named Pyroclast [2] directly on top of Onyx. Our code base is written entirely in Clojure. The architecture we've ended up with is hands down the cleanest I've ever worked on.

[1] http://www.onyxplatform.org [2] http://pyroclast.io/


We're using Clojure and ClojureScript to build a process management application for enterprises. On the backend we use Ring, Bidi, Honeysql, Postgresql; on the frontend, Rum (React wrapper).

Very pleased so far, though occasionally run into some issues. Will probably consider Datomic at some point in the future, though wanted to stay conservative on that front while we get the rest of the app up and running.

Getting started is pretty easy nowadays, especially on the frontend with figwheel: `lein new figwheel my-app -- --rum`


I just rewrote and am running a backend Clojure server (for about 2 years) that does NLP processing (using Stanford Core NLP, a Java NLP framework) and spell checking. Pretty soon, it will become a proxy server in front of our API to handle proxy tasks (auth, rate limiting etc.) and to replace a lot of the slow API functionality. I wish I could replace every other app too but for now I'm just glad to have more Clojure work rewriting parts of the API.


I'm using Clojure and ClojureScript for Co-op Source (a platform for building software cooperatives) and have found it to be a great set of tools that keeps everything simple and clean. While it is not public/production, it will be soon ;-)

I've also started using ClojureCLR (via Arcadia) to build a VR/AR software development environment for use with Co-op Source. Using a REPL within Unity3D is awesome for prototyping.


We're using ClojureScript at https://www.lunchboxsessions.com for developer tooling, to build our interactive animations. It's a joy, and we're eager to apply it to more problem domains.

I also use it on the side to make music (professionally, but not as a career). Not sure if "live on stage" counts as "in production" ;)


Any links to your music?


http://ivanish.ca/diminished-fifth/

Runs in realtime in the browser. WIP, naturally. Works better on a computer, but it should also play on mobile devices.


Using it wherever possible at my company.

We built an async rate limiting server to protect our APIs on a per ip/per user/per customer basis. Much nicer language than node is which would be the usual choice for async code. The aleph server library is amazing, thanks Zach tellman.

We also built an internal management console for reporting on our customer base as well as simplifying and auditing common support actions.


I'm using it at work for front end work, GraphQL services, and cron jobs.

It's a great set up with GraphQL specifically since Walmart just release Lacinia and Alumbra/Claro are coming into play as more mature libraries.

With the way that it's going at work lately, we're going to be using Clojure much more in the future!


Just a little reactive devcards app given a youtube url calls their api for the title/time and spits out some html for use in a cms. https://ecampuscenter.github.io/#!/htmlms.youtube


We're using Clojure, ClojureScript & Datomic at

https://blossom.io (project tracking)

https://lemmings.io (incubator w/ focus on art & artificial intelligence)


Liaison.com uses it for some microservices to store and analyze time-series JSON data, kinda similar to Datomic, for enterprise customers. I interviewed with Apple a few years ago (didn't get the job), they are using Clojure for internal services to support the iTunes infrastructure.


At IRIS.TV we use Clojure & ClojureScript to

* power our data pipeline (precompiled Clojure on Apache Spark, + Kafka & Cassandra)

* build our internal configuration management and reporting tool (Clojure server, CLJS+React client)

* glue things together (microservices in Clojure)

* investigate systems and data (Clojure repl)


We use clojure on the backend and clojurescript as our admin ui across our supply chain exchange at https://www.openmarketshealth.com


We're developing a smart pillbox with a mobile app written in ClojureScript with React Native and a backend written in Clojure. http://pilloxa.com


BookWell ( https://www.bookwell.com.au/ ) uses Clojure on the backend, ClojureScript on the front, and Datomic as the database.


We're using clojure both for new products and existing java codebases, and we've just introduced clojurescript on a smallish SPA. Mostly health and services sectors.

It's surprisingly boring (in the good sense).


I'm using it for web development as well as backend services for large data pipelines and some ETL. I've also used ClojureScript in production, for an entire web stack built in Clojure(Script).


We use lots of Clojure at Amperity - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BThkk5zv0DE&t=1s


Intent Media (http://intentmedia.com)'s data science functionality has a fair amount of Clojure behind the scenes.


Kira Systems in Toronto uses it across the stack (web server, backend data processing, and platform API and SDK, according to their website). Their product analyzes contracts using machine learning.


I built PartsBox (https://partsbox.io/) using Clojure and ClojureScript. Would be very difficult without them.


We use Clojure to build an AI platform, and we are hiring :) https://juji.io/fullstack


We use Clojure extensively at Room Key. Our main web API, various scheduled cron-like jobs, and AWS Lambda functions are all written in Clojure.


CircleCI uses ClojureScript and Om for their front-end (and I think Clojure on the back-end too, though I don't have details).


I know of Walmart, and Siemens Rail Automation - North America.


Anybody hiring on a freelance/contract basis?




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