freestonme

A Year as a Professional Clojure Developer

Yesterday marked the end of my first year in my current role, where I joined as a "full stack" developer in a company that primarily uses Clojure having worked almost exclusively as an iOS developer using Objective-C and Swift and using Clojure in my spare time.

Not only that, but as of earlier this year I'm also a founding member of our Cloud Platform team, which well and truly completes my move away from being a mobile developer. I'm incredibly grateful to my current employer for giving me a chance even though my professional experience wasn't an obvious match. Sixteen months ago I doubted I'd ever be able to make this leap and now I spend my days writing Clojure tooling, libraries and services and spinning cloud infrastructure up and down with terraform. I'm learning so much every day, and most weeks I genuinely look forward to going to work.

There's nothing more to this post than that. I just wanted a record of this for myself, and just maybe it'll inspire someone else some day: I took a (small) leap by applying to the kind of job I wanted rather than what I'd been doing, someone was willing to tkae a chance on me, and now I'm happier with my work than I've been in a very long time. Sometimes you've just got to take a moment to appreciate what you've achieved and what you've got.

Read More