Today I am thrilled to announce that I have joined Relevance, Inc.

People have been paying me to write code for a couple of decades now and I’ve been very fortunate to have great opportunities. I felt very lucky in this transition to have had time to figure out what I wanted and where I could make the biggest impact. I found some great options (thank you if you’re reading), particularly some things that I would have loved at other points in my career.

I wanted to find a position that combined my technical background (particularly in concurrency, the JVM, data-oriented server systems, and Clojure) with my marketing, conference, speaking and community work (the people stuff). I wanted to combine these in a place where I could put my whole drive into something I believed. Relevance is that place.

I have worked in many languages over the last couple of decades but I have spent the vast majority of my time in OO languages (C++ and Java). For me, Clojure was a lightning bolt. Rich Hickey (the creator) identified and described issues I had been wrestling with for years and provided a coherent, composable set of tools that let me solve problems without ceremony or complexity.

Rich and Clojure/core continue to extend the ideas of immutable data, the value of values, separation of identity and state, and the importance of separable but composable parts to ClojureScript, Datomic, Pedestal, reducers, core.async, and more. I believe that these principles are creating a new and better way to think about building software systems. I want to help spread these ideas in the world. We all need simpler, more reliable programs that are easier to write and maintain.

Regarding conferences… Clojure/West will continue to exist in much the same form but with greater support and backing from Relevance. I am very fortunate to team up with Lynn Grogan at Relevance in working on both the east coast Clojure/conj and Clojure/West. Strange Loop will remain a production of Strange Loop LLC and there are no plans to alter its current successful course. Lambda Jam (Chicago July 8-10, tickets still available!) will continue to be a Strange Loop LLC production as well.