Clojure in Product. Would you do it again?
Clojure in Product. Would you do it again?
Podcast Description
Real-life product stories and insights from top Clojure leaders.We launched this podcast because we're fascinated by a paradox: Clojure is an exceptional language with a powerful philosophy behind it, yet it remains relatively niche in the industry. By talking to teams who've actually implemented Clojure in production, we're trying to understand this disconnect.Is there something fundamental limiting Clojure's adoption, or is it just circumstantial?Through conversations with people, who've taken the leap and built real systems with Clojure, we're exploring whether they would "do it again" — and more importantly, why or why not. We're hoping these real-world stories can help understand Clojure's place in the industry and perhaps shed light on its future potential.Visit our podcast page: freshcodeit.com/podcast
Podcast Insights
Content Themes
Focuses on the adoption and implementation of Clojure in production environments, discussing its benefits and challenges. Specific themes include software development processes, hiring practices, and team culture, with episodes like 'You need boundaries to do a meaningful work' and 'ClojureScript is a Clojure killer app' providing tangible insights for software teams.
Real-life product stories and insights from top Clojure leaders.
We launched this podcast because we’re fascinated by a paradox: Clojure is an exceptional language with a powerful philosophy behind it, yet it remains relatively niche in the industry. By talking to teams who’ve actually implemented Clojure in production, we’re trying to understand this disconnect.
Is there something fundamental limiting Clojure’s adoption, or is it just circumstantial?
Through conversations with people, who’ve taken the leap and built real systems with Clojure, we’re exploring whether they would “do it again” — and more importantly, why or why not.
We’re hoping these real-world stories can help understand Clojure’s place in the industry and perhaps shed light on its future potential.
Visit our podcast page: freshcodeit.com/podcast
In the 11th episode of “Clojure in product. Would you do it again?”, Artem Barmin and Vadym Kostiuk speak with Jeremiah Via, Staff Software Engineer at The New York Times. Jeremiah describes how Clojure was introduced and adopted across the search stack at a major media organization, and why JVM interop and practical tooling made it the right choice for their data-processing workloads.
Our conversation walks through concrete topics: Jeremiah’s Clojure origin story, the iterative migration from PHP, Erlang, Python, and Java to JVM/Clojure services, and the search team’s day-to-day work, including how they push vector embeddings into Elasticsearch for AI features and performance.
We also dig into hiring and engineering practices: onboarding newcomers with an emphasis on functional thinking and REPL workflows, hiring for search/domain expertise over prior Clojure experience, maintaining code discipline, and addressing production concerns like memory sizing and performance tuning. As Jeremiah notes, “Now with AI stuff, people can be productive very fast without understanding it, using a cursor and tools like that,” and he cautions that it remains to be seen how this will affect the deeper mental model of learning to think in Clojure.
We conclude with Jeremiah’s response to a question from our previous guest, Cam Saul from Metabase.
Listen to our podcast and get more insights about Clojure in product: https://www.freshcodeit.com/podcast
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