Clojure it is

Last Friday I finally told my boss that I am going to leave his company for another job.

It’s not the first time in my working life that I want to move to greener pastures. For different reasons I changed jobs quite a lot in the last 10 years. However, this is the first time that I made my decision based on the programming language being used in the office.

As much as I had fun working with Java 8, in the last months there has been little of it. Bouncing back and forth between Java 7 and PHP 5.6 for legacy code maintenance is not exactly my idea of fun.

Both Clojure and functional programming changed the way I think about solving problems with code. I often found myself thinking outside the boundaries of OOP, craving for pure and higher-order functions, all of which are just out of reach in the afore mentioned versions of Java and PHP.

The adoption of Clojure by Italian software houses is still close to none. It’s been a while since I started looking for a job with Clojure, but until now the only opportunities I found required moving to another country. I even tried to convince myself I was willing to pack my bags again, but family comes first and deep in my heart I knew I couldn’t ask my wife to leave everything behind.

Imagine my shock when I heard that 7bridges was hiring. Marco Dalla Stella, CTO and Co–founder of the company, is the man who guided me through my first steps with Clojure. It was him, 2 years ago, who pointed me to Programming Clojure and The Joy of Clojure. It was him who joined me for a trip to Bologna where LambdaCon happened. He’s also an Emacs user, which means he must be one of the good guys.

And now I can’t wait to start working with Clojure for real. I celebrated the beginning of this new adventure with a new Dell XPS 13 which will surely be perfect for what I have in mind.

Eventually, Clojure it is.