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Nubank acquires Cognitect

cognitect.com

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Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#121
post #77

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.

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!

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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://www.fdic.gov/deposit/ - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Deposit_Insurance_Corp... - https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/17/business/bank-earnings-defaul...

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

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#123
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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), a…

Are there any screen casts out there showcasing the utility of CIDER? I guess I have just never been a big emacs guy so it felt sort of clumsy to me but I am probably just missing something. Could also be that I am just too familiar with the Cursive workflow.

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#124
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Whether this is false depends on particular country laws. For example in the EU you can't call yourself a "bank" without being subject to regulation, and in Poland for example, if you are a "bank", your money is actually protected against failure, up to €100,000.

Deposits insurance has nothing to do with that.

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#125

> 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 .

What if a typical bank usually has 20 times more LoC and 5x more developers?

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#126

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 m…

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 ) and/or clojure.…

Thanks! Can you talk a bit more about the static checking of cross-boundaries schemas? Any relation to tools that allow a schema to evolve without breaking compatibility, like protobuf?

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#127
post #96
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

> 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?

It takes the will and discipline to use it, but what Clojure Spec (and other schemata libs) offer is, in a lot of ways, more powerful and flexible than traditional type systems. A spec can be thought of more as a contract with the data, one with enough detail that it can be used to auto-generate conformant example data even. If, for instance, you have a function, that needs to work on either, integers, or numeric strings, and textual fractions like '1/5'. Enforcing this constraint on input, and getting informative exceptions on bad data is easy with a spec, and the function code does not need to contain all of the noise to validate or coerce data. Sure, you don't see the problem at compile time, but if you can auto-generate test data, the tests that you should already have become easier to write.

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#128

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.

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.

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#129
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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

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

https://www.meetup.com/Clojure-nyc/events/268460200/

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#130

can one make a career out of clojure?

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.

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?

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