Clojurians Log v2

Hi! I’m Ricardo 👋 I'm 34, from Portugal 🇵🇹, a father of two and husband to an amazing wife. I’ve been passionate about computers since childhood, spending time in my uncle’s hardware shop tinkering and gaming, later exploring the early internet in cybercafes. I once dreamed of making games, but life took me through six years in the Army and then into electronics, automation, and control, where I worked for seven years. Through it all, my love for computers never faded, and I built a strong foundation in programming along the way. I've been working in Software for the past 3 years mainly in languages like Java 8, JS/TS, Bash and Python and contributed to some notable open-source projects such as FasterXML/jackson-databind and apache/commons-configuration, adding new features to both, they are both small contributions which I nevertheless take great pride for the experience I got by participating in them and meeting the brilliant people who work at these projects. I do want to keep contributing to open-source but getting into legacy projects is really time consuming and I only have so much time to spare with work, family and just a bit of spare time which I often use for self-training and keep growing as a SWE. Moved by notable people like Uncle Bob which I have followed most of my life, I decided to finally flip the switch and just learn Clojure - and I couldn't feel more bitter-sweet since I'm loving my experience with the language so far, but at the same time I regret not having embarked on this much much earlier. My more practical goal with Clojure is to hopefully be able to bring it in my current/upcoming projects where I work (I have lots of autonomy as part of the decision making process in my team) by converting some of the "less well made" Java ETL components into Clojure ETL components with better performance, memory management (better GC optimization), and also more scalable with better immutability management and a more data oriented design. My less practical more career oriented goal is to where I want to be in the future which is to work with Clojure based applications a lot more and be surrounded by the Clojurian mindset with people who put a lot more thought about what they build and how they build it and to cherish in their passion for software. 🙂