Relevance, the consultancy behind Clojure/core, blogs about Clojure, architecture decisions and development workflow, and hosts a podcast with Clojure figures.
HN links it for its Clojure workflow and architecture decision posts and its podcasts with Rich Hickey; the comments also include its job postings.
OP uses the word "rejected" 9 times.
A-level hiring is not about rejection. A-players aren't looking for a "job" and A-managers aren't trying to build an assembly line. It's about finding a mutual relationship where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and that requires a lot of things to come together.
> As a startup, if you have the opportunity to bring on an A player in a low risk role (like an internship), you do it
All circumstances are different, so maybe he should have found room for Dan, or maybe not. Engineering quality (and talent in general) is on a power law distribution. When you consider engineering quality to be a competitive advantage (not all startups, even YC startups, need this), your early hires are your future managers, and will tend to influence the future hires. Its tough to attract and close people smarter/better than you.
I imagine myself now at age 26 (pretty decent engineer, doing functional programming and stuff), and compare to age 21 (cocky, overconfident) and while I was smart and driven and all that, it doesn't mean I can contribute to a rockstar team. I would drown and get left behind. World class teams at the top of the power law distribution, say the Clojure team[1], at age 21 I'd be a few orders of magnitude behind them and just not worth paying. at age 26, who knows, probably still at least 1 order of magnitude behind, not worth hiring. Square peg, round hole. At least I can see my trajectory of exponential growth over the…
This is how runkit does it for nodejs and I think it’s working quite well for them.
We (at Nextjournal) tried doing the same for other languages (Python, Julia, R) and felt that it didn’t work nearly as well. You often want to change a cell at the top e.g. to add a new import and it can be quite annoying when long-running dependent cells re-execute automatically. I now think that automatic execution of dependent cells works great when your use case is fast executing cells (see observablehq) but we need to figure out something else for longer running cells. One idea that I haven’t tried yet is only run cells automatically that have executed within a given threshold.
I hear a lot of complaints about hidden state but I think it’s less of a problem in reality. It’s just a lot faster than always rerunning things from a clean slate. Clojure's live programming model [1] works incredibly well by giving the user full control over what should be evaluated. But Clojure's focus on immutability also makes this work really well. I rarely run into issues where I'm still depending on a var that's been removed and then there's still the reloaded workflow [2].
Overall I think notebooks are currently a great improvement for people that would otherwise create plain scripts – working on it is a lot quicker when you have an easy way to just execute parts of it. Plus there's the obvious benefit of interleaving prose and results. That doesn't mean we should not be thinking about addressing the…
This is an example of how much the Clojure eco-system is maturing.
It is important to note that this is coming from http://thinkrelevance.com/ . This company has some of the earliest and crucial contributors to the Clojure eco-system.
The summary on that page:
"Traditional lean web development languages focus on two things: ease and speed.
Ease has meant ease of adoption and ease of development. This has encouraged more people to engage with technology.
Speed has meant speed to market and speed of development. This has brought rapid innovation to building straightforward web applications.
However there is a new suite of problems that require more. Problems that require multi-layered, fine-grained security. Performance that scales. Dynamically evolving client server communication. Real-time analytics. Complex data transformations. There hasn't traditionally been a right choice for this suite of problems.
Why? Because they are difficult and easy solutions aren’t designed to solve them. Rather, you need simple solutions."
Durham NC (main office) - REMOTE full-time and contractors
Relevance, Inc.
www.thinkrelevance.com
Rails or Clojure Developers, Project Managers
http://thinkrelevance.com/jobs
We are Clojure/core (http://clojure.com).
Relevance has been voted as one of the Best Places to Work in the Triangle both 2010 and 2011 (Triangle Business Journal). We were also ranked #739 in this year's Inc 500|5000 list. We have a fantastic work environment that includes 20% Fridays (work on open source, giving back to the community, or internal projects) and a great benefits package.
Relevance is increasingly a virtual company and have many remote full-time developers around the country. We're now opening up the project manager positions to being remote as well.
Come work with some of the best Ruby/Rails and Clojure developers on solving interesting, hard problems that make a difference.
email us: jobs [at] thinkrelevance [dot] com
Include Hacker News in the subject line
What I meant by "the whole org is on board" isn't that there weren't other opinions. There have been multiple opinions on almost every decision we make (and we have an open process and document our decisions in a style very much like this one[1]). In the end, it's not about "shooting down" alternatives, since that's loaded language. It's about making what we think is the best choice we can with the information available to us.
Even in this thread, there's a chorus of voices sounding caution based on their limited information of what our situation looks like, but there are others who see why we're doing this, based on the same limited information.
We absolutely do know the risks of this project, which is why we're doing this as incrementally as possible.
[1]: http://thinkrelevance.com/blog/2011/11/15/documenting-architecture-decisions
Durham NC (main office) - REMOTE full-time and contractors
Relevance, Inc.
http://thinkrelevance.com
http://thinkrelevance.com/jobs
We are Clojure/core (http://clojure.com).
Relevance has been voted as one of the Best Places to Work in the Triangle (Triangle Business Journal). We have a fantastic work environment that includes 20% Fridays (work on open source, giving back to the community, or internal projects), and a fantastic benefits package.
Relevance is increasingly a virtual company and have many remote full-time developers around the country. We're now opening up the project manager positions to being remote as well.
Come work with some of the best Ruby/Rails and Clojure developers on solving interesting, hard problems that make a difference.