Clojurians Log v2

How do you guys find projects/clients for your self. I am freelancing but want to find some project me and my friends can work on.

heh I would say it is a gamble, no rationale here 😉

@kurva When I was freelancing, nearly all of my projects/clients came to me through personal networking -- but that's because of my location, background, activity level in the community, etc. So, yeah, as @kwladyka says, it's a gamble really.

🙂 right now - I don't know where to start...

@kurva Where do you live?

It's going to be different in every country, I suspect, and likely different in every region even. Location/laws control so much of how companies interact with freelancers. In England, I used to work through an agency (so they found projects/clients for me, and took a cut of my rates). In the US, I mostly worked directly with clients (as a sole proprietor business primarily, although I've also worked through a C corp I set up for a while) -- and that's meant networking / word-of-mouth to get projects, although I've also sub-contracted through friends of mine that had an established client relationship but needed additional resources.

@seancorfield hmm I will use opportunity to ask about trends in US. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F03yb8hb Since 2017 Clojure lost almost 50% popularity. I have hard time for my motivation. What is happening in US about Clojure in this context? Anything happening to stabilize Clojure on the market?

> that’s meant networking / word-of-mouth to get projects Can you share which are the most efficient for you? I mean tech meetings about Clojure or totally other meetings?

Lithuania

oh so I guess there is no market for Clojure in your country

the same for me

I am from Poland

few companies here, but not too much. so I usually remote

And this is not only google trends, I experience the difference. 1-2 years ago I had regular propositions on linkedin, but not in 2019.

the trend is extremely sucking. Clojure should gain popularity not loose...

Anyway I want to know trends in US about Clojure - that is the point of my question. Feature of Clojure 🙂

Why should? Almost nobody use it - this is the true

I don’t understand why, because I like it 😉

Could bee partly Kotlin, it's higher ranked here, https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2019/07/18/language-rankings-6-19/ and also see Kotlin a lot more asked. Although also dissimilar on a high level, alternative, more functional, less boilerplate JVM language, they are the same. But Kotlin is much easier to get into, and also is easier to run as 'hybrid' with Java.

Uch I din’t try Kotlin, so hard to say something 🙂

Clojure seems to go down, right when Kotlin sharply increased, https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F03yb8hb,kotlin

But I see Kotlin became very popular vs Clojure

at least on google trends

exactly

I did, it's like 'a better Java' which has pro's and cons, like it's really easy to work with mutable objects. Also it integrates with Spring which is a big plus. Although personally I like the composable/functional/data-centric approach of Clojure-(libraries) a lot more.

I think generally students/new devs don't like syntax outside of the C-family style of syntax. They see a lisp and have a knee jerk reaction to it. That has been my experience from talking to other devs outside my team and friends who do dev. If they can't do this int my-number = 12; then they don't want anything to do with it.

Well I think the brutal true is somewhere else: - syntax is important, but not so much. More important is tooling around. For example editors, error messages etc. Tooling > syntax. Less choices what library to use > syntax. - All my favorite tools which I use are in golang, 0 in Clojure. This is probably, because of JVM, but to be honest I have no idea.

So Clojure is very good designed, but I am not sure if it gives some real values which others languages don’t

Funny you say that, cause golang is also losing interest. I think what's lacking most is something like Spring, sure (almost) anything Spring does you can doe with Clojure, but you need to do relatively a lot of research to get all the pieces together. And even then in a year some library may no longer be maintained anymore.

for not web development I would probably choose golang / rust. For web development not sure. But Clojure doesn’t have anything what other languages don’t have today.

Clojure has great syntax which I really like and the best community 🙂

But is it enough to win competition on the market?

I haven't been freelancing since I started with Clojure, but local tech meetups were a good source of leads for projects/clients prior to that, for all techs that I did.

From what we see not 🙂

What is the competition? The most popular programming language?

Attending conferences and chatting to people about their use of the chosen tech is also helpful (I got several projects as a direct result of attending a conference and networking with other attendees).

popular and growing popular

And, for me, it has definitely helped being actively involved in FOSS for almost every tech community I've worked in since the early 90's...

just what people choose instead

I believe if beginners aren't adopting it then it won't be a popular language

I remember at school taking a class that had us use Racket. Nobody liked it

Because it was a LISP

anecdote of course

The folks who've been driving Clojure from day one have never been very concerned about Clojure being "popular", they're much concerned about it being a technically great language. Lisps are never going to be "popular". Clojure is never going to be mainstream.

It's not as niche as some other languages but it is definitely niche -- and it always will be.

The biggest "problem" that causes is that there are a lot more people who want to use Clojure than are ever going to actually use it for work.

> Clojure is never going to be mainstream I don’t expect it. But I am a little worry about job in this language in next few years. Actually even now and in 2020 🙂

There's a common misconception that popular equals good.

That said, Clojure/conj used to have a very small percentage of attendees who used Clojure at work and that's now something like 50% -- and attendance has gone up every year... so there are more Clojure jobs than there used to be but perhaps not as many open jobs now.

I’ve run a few clojure workshops in orgs and in the community and the syntax is a big deal for most people. Genuinely because for the first ten seconds haskell looks closer to C I think it’s less intimidating to a beginner… well, for about fifteen seconds until somebody says ‘monad’

also fwiw I’ve used clojure for work before, then went to python and js bc of lack of jobs, using clojure now but I don’t know about the future

There are also a lot more developers, something like 100% every 5 years? So even if there are 50% more Clojure jobs than 5 years ago, relatively it's getting smaller.

longer term I suspect there won’t be a future for me in clojure, but y’know, nothing’s forever dude

For better or for worse (j/k, it’s for worse), our industry is driven by fads

@gklijs Interesting point about the growth in the number of developers (and, therefore the number of jobs in IT)...

Did you do open source as part of the work or in free time?

I consider myself lucky to have my first job outta college be a clojure shop.

I have always cautioned developers about being a "Language X Developer" rather than being a (good) developer with multiple languages. I've used a dozen languages in production over my career. Maybe more. I'm happy with Clojure today and hope to keep using it but if there are no Clojure jobs I could go back to Scala, Java, C++ even. Or I could probably find my way into a Kotlin gig on the basis of all the JVM stuff I've done. There's a lot of stuff available for experienced developers on the JVM 🙂

As long as people solve real world problems with Clojure they will have Clojure jobs. Business doesn't really care what programming language you use. They care that you get the shit done.

Both. But more of it has been in my free time I guess. When I've been freelance, I've treated that as part of my regular project workload tho' (and generated revenue from offering consulting/support to companies that use some of those projects).

When I was learning Clojure it was hard. A year ago I was forced to do something in TypeScript. Back to code in different language is much harder, you see how you don’t want to code again 😉 It is so scary vision 🙂

yeah if I couldn’t do clojure I could find something else

though I’d rather do it for now, I’m a lisp weenie at heart

damn, did you have live besides of coding? huge respect to find a balance in live

> have always cautioned developers about being a “Language X Developer” On the other hand I have feeling market expect you to be expert in X and then pay you more

specialization is in price

hmmm in the UK it’s going the other way. Recruiters still care about that but most jobs are flexible on the tech and look for experience and attitude

Hmm but when saying that I am 100% remote

not sure if it change anything

yeah probably completely different

I'm not saying you can't be "expert in X" -- just don't make X your identity, nor focus only on jobs involving X.

As a freelancer, I specifically budgeted conferences, committees, and/or FOSS work as part of my regular schedule -- I wouldn't take projects to completely fill my time with paid work, in other words: I aimed for 80/20 (so I still had my 20% time). As an employee, I've also always pushed for something close to 80/20 (90/10 is what I'll settle for in a company that has been resistant). And, yes, I also do FOSS "for fun" outside that schedule -- 30 minutes here and there, while watching TV, or sometimes I'll turn an entire evening over to FOSS (say, three hours) instead of TV. My family don't mind as long as I don't make a habit of it 🙂

It's not hard to find 30 minutes a day for something. People do this with exercise, TV, reading, whatever. I do it with a laptop and FOSS 🙂

as someone who both has language preferences and hires, I agree. to me, “X programmer” is a hint that person has limited experience, is inflexible, or isn’t curious. obviously not always true. that said, I do get excited when I run into a CV where languages we are currently using are mentioned

would be bit of a paradox in the case of Clojure... is it inflexible to stick to an arbitrarily flexible language? routinely grabbing goodies from other langs doesn't happen so often elsewhere (I comment this just because it seems a curious case)

by “inflexible” I mean someone refusing to use anything other than language X. the decision about which language to use should be based on the problem being solved and the people solving that problem—it shouldn’t default to one person’s favorite language

This is exactly what I mean about people identifying themselves with a specific technology.