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#jobs-discuss
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2018-08-17
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gklijs12:08:37

I wonder if I would be possible to do some paid Clojure besides my normal job. There are sometimes remote jobs coming by, but most times it requires full-time. I’ve been busy with several pet projects for the last two years, but for several reasons it would be nice to spend that time on something more serious. There is the option to think of something innovative myself, but so far I don’t really have a good idea. Another option would be to do some web development, for some small companies, but I’m afraid that’s not worth the trouble, and to be fair probably something like wordpress is a better fit for those.

manutter5112:08:37

I actually took the other approach: developing Clojure-based in-house apps as part of my day job. Sufficiently non-mission-critical that it wasn’t too hard to get permission, but still useful to in-house folks.

gklijs13:08:13

nice, but my own company is not that open to clojure, also we do very little in-house.

manutter5113:08:41

I’ve had jobs like that, but sometimes I found some little utility I could make that would be useful to me personally, and then I wrote it, and then co-workers wanted a copy, etc.

manutter5113:08:17

Example: my boss decided he wanted a weekly email listing 3 goals each of us had accomplished during the week, as well as any blockers/issues, and any requests/suggestions. I was always drawing a blank on Friday, so I made a CLJS/Electron app that let me make notes during the week, and then generated the email body with one button click.

jeremy21:08:32

I am doing this now as well. Find tooling and write code around it in Clojure. If the company decides to use it then great, otherwise, it was a good learning experience interfacing with data that I would have otherwise had troubles with coming up with a use case for.

jeremy21:08:25

If it's worthwhile, I have also been known to rewrite whole systems in clojure. It's slow, time permitting and most likely won't get used but it good experience otherwise.

vemv12:08:29

I'd look into working on tooling (nREPL, cider, clj-refactor, cljs stuff etc), as it definitely can be a part-time thing that needs less personal involvement (no meetings!). Not sure about the money part, but it's reasonable to imagine that a good constant performer can be eventually take a chunk from e.g. Clojurists Together, Open Collective, Bountysource etc Plus being a committer to those projects should make it easier to land your next clj job

mauricio.szabo13:08:05

I took a similar approach: on my current work (Ruby-based) there's a critical project that needs multiple intricate ifs and cases to be solved. I saw then an opportunity to work with Clara-Rules, and made a simple proof-of-concept. Probably it'll be what we'll use in production

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jeremy21:08:31

Did you have to interop with Java? I did this as well but haven't pitched it yet, because we're a Java shop and the primary use case would be providing a library that a Java application would use. I wanted the rules to be clojure structures and not Java beans/records. 😕 Hmm

mauricio.szabo13:08:02

(some days later... :D) We're not working with Java in production, so no interop with existing systems or libraries. But, there are some libraries that I'll need to interop with, but I don't have this need to produce a code that'll be used in a full Java project

gklijs13:08:06

I did a poc exposing data from kafka with GraphQL, but they rather had each service had it’s own endpoints 😞

mauricio.szabo13:08:59

There'll be always irrational decisions in management. Once I was hired to port a monolithic system to Clojure with RabbitMQ. I was literally hired just to do it, and when I did, they decided to not use it...

mauricio.szabo13:08:10

At least I was paid ¯\(ツ)

gklijs13:08:04

It was not that irrational. It was mainly done because it was faster to show something workable.. But I would have very much liked to build on it. Have everything with a schema and avro, so java or .net would also be fine to supply data..