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Nubank acquires Cognitect

cognitect.com

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Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#201

Post by ballpark »

andrenth wrote: post #62

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…

I've watched a number of Clojure centric talks from Nubank employees. Actually, I think it was one particular employee, but I don't remember his name. One was on how they do testing. The others were about Fulcro, which is a very interesting web frontend library/framework.

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#202

Post by mapgrep »

jonahbenton wrote: post #120
juskrey wrote: post #86

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 h…

With respect, I see where you are coming from, but would argue it isn't necessarily the right read, either in terms of banks, or in terms of Clojure, though there is nuance. Banks are systemic actors in the financial system. They have privileges granted only to them, requirements that only they have to meet. It is HARD to build and operate a bank, whether in the US or in another country. From a "fragility" perspectiv…

“If you aren't working with Datomic, or in finance- this move is a stronger statement that maybe Clojure doesn't have the strongest future for you.”

I don’t follow. The company the python BDFL last worked for was a storage outfit with a valuation roughly equal to Nubank. The Rails BDFL is at a pretty small software shop in Chicago. Ruby BDFL was at a division of Salesforce last I checked.

Seems a bit reductive to say that Clojure creator being employed by a bank makes Clojure a worse choice outside finance.

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#203

Post by hcarvalhoalves »

stopachka wrote: post #176
hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

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 )

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/) 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) and replacing legacy services.

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#206

Post by dkersten »

swyx wrote: post #153
keeganpoppen wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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 )

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

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.

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#207

Post by nathell »

jwr wrote: post #161
swyx wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what was your decision process leading to bet on Clojure?

I used to enjoy programming in Common Lisp, then saw a talk by Rich Hickey which intrigued me. I gave Clojure a try (this was about 8 years ago I think) and (much to my surprise) it turned out it works really well. It also turned out that a coherent concurrency story is important, and that programming with mutable data is not a very good idea after all, so I abandoned CL completely. Over the years, I got many fantast…

That’d have been 11 years ago. I know because my earliest Clojure project on GitHub hearkens back to July 2009, and I jumped onto the bandwagon after hearing enthusiastic opinions of yours.

Not sure whether I ever had the opportunity to properly thank you, but let me say so now. Thank you, jwr.

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#208

Post by setr »

jonahbenton wrote: post #129
ru552 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

direct link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dW4V3stFX0

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#209

Post by dkersten »

jwr wrote: post #160
phrygian wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose a question for you would be how has your business supported clojure(script)? It seems to me to be a case of a business that has benefited from clojure - and wants to be invested in its future - doing something about it. It cost something to provide what you built your business on :)

A while ago I started to set aside an R&D budget that goes towards developers writing open source, specifically Clojure and ClojureScript libraries, and tools like magit or CIDER. The amounts are still small (this is not an enterprise business), but I'm increasing them regularly. I want to see a stable, long-term ecosystem with maintainers that are getting paid for their work.

I am about to (next two or three months) launch a company/product that is heavily built on Clojure(script) too and I was actually thinking about this exact thing just this week! There are a number of libraries that I rely on that I would love to give back to, both as a thanks for the work so far, and to fund future development. I'm not in a position to do so yet, but its something I very strongly hope to do in the not-too-distant future, if things go generally well.

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#210

Post by jacobsmith1984 »

jwr wrote: post #117

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…

"My entire business is built on Clojure and ClojureScript, and it would not have been possible without these languages."

No company depends any new language to succeed, depends on customers.

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