synthc

I think the language has indeed reached a stable point and found its niche, which is small, but there are certainly domains where Clojure is the best fit.

The ideas behind Clojure (functional, immutable datastructures, homoiconic syntax, focus on simplicity, JVM interop) still stand strong IMO.

There are still some exciting projects done in Clojure: Electric Clojure and Rama come to mind.

Elastic is much more of a pita to maintain and monitor than Mongo

I prefer curl and bash for testing API's, it's less polished, but very flexible and it will never break or require an account.

But for sharing requests in a team an app is nice. I had a good experience with Bruno. Bonus point for easy to store configs.

Location: NL

Remote: yes, or hybrid

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: deep experience in stream processing and backend development, Kotlin, Java, Kafka, SQL, Clojure, AWS, GCP, Azure. Looking to get back into AI.

Resume: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisblomnl/

Email: whowantstobehired@chrisblom.net

I am a dedicated and versatile software developer with an MSc in Artificial Intelligence and over 12 years of experience in developing innovative software in various domains. My expertise is designing and building reliable, fast backend systems that handle lots of data. I can support the entire development cycle, from gathering requirements to design, architecture, planning, implementation, testing, DevOps, monitoring and optimization.

Furthermore, I have experience in building interactive dashboards, data visualizations and AI applications such as automated planning, machine learning and natural language processing.

My goal is to deliver high-quality software that solves complex problems. To achieve this, I value understanding the problem, rapid iteration and collaboration with colleagues.

note: you have to make an introduction video just to apply

SEEKING WORK | NL or REMOTE | Backend / Data / Streaming

Hi i'm Chris, an experienced data & backend engineer with a decade of of experience in building reliable, scalable data platforms and data processing pipelines, using Kafka, NoSQL databases and related tech, for domain such as clickstreams and IoT sensor data.

I can help with:

- designing and building data platforms and streaming processing systems

- teaching your devs how to correctly use Kafka

- fixing bottlenecks and performance issues.

- lowering costs

- how to ensure your data is correct and processed with the right guarantees

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisblomnl/

Contact: hackernews@chrisblom.net

'Modern' food can be ridiculously calorie dense, it's nearly impossible to compensate overeating with exercise. A single candy bar can have as much calories as a whole meal. Count calories for a couple months and you will learn which foods to avoid.

SEEKING WORK | NL or REMOTE | Optimizing data pipelines

Hi i'm Chris, an experienced data/backend engineer with a decade of of experience in building data platforms and processing pipelines, using Kafka, NoSQL databases and related tech.

I can help with:

- setting up data platforms and streaming processing systems

- teaching your devs how to use Kafka

- fixing scaling issues

- lowering costs

- improving performance

- how to ensure your data is correct and processed with the right guarantees

My hourly rate is 95 euros, project-based billing is also possible for clearly scoped projects.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisblomnl/

Contact: hackernews@chrisblom.net

actual chemtrails, the conspiracy theorists will love it!

Google's search quality has been going down the drain for years. I get more and more fake wikipedia and stack overflow SEO results and I use it less and less. Can't wait until some search oriented LLM company replaces it.

Interesting paper, i've thought about this topic a lot.

In previous projects I defined systems in a single code base, and parts could be deployed separately by providing different configuration files.

It was a very productive approach: one could run the whole system in a single process during development, which made writing integration tests a lot easier than spinning up dozens of docker images.

It still required some manual work, and deployments were still to static for my liking. Ideally it should be possible to split off and scale subparts dynamically.

In the Clojure world there are several projects now that explore splitting up services in a transparent way.

For example Electric Clojure splits up your code into frontend and backend parts, making the frontend-backend split transparent. Another project is Rama, which does something similar but for distributed steam processing and partitioning.

I'd love to explore something like this but for enterprisey service meshes: the programmer just defines services, and a compiler decides how to split these over different machines, and all the RPC/serialization/deserialization is done for you.

SEEKING WORK | REMOTE or Netherlands

Location: Utrecht, Netherlands

My expertise is building reliable backend systems: efficient, stable systems that solve a business problem and can last for years with minimal maintenance.

I'm for hire as lead developer / architect. I can either work in a team or deliver projects independently.

Previous projects include:

- developing and speeding up NLP pipelines for processing financial news

- a real-time bidding platform capable of handling 100k request/sec

- migrating a system that processes sensor data for 3 million customers to Kafka

- leading the development of a scalable, low latency stock inventory system

- building a employee scheduler engine using TimeFlow/Optaplanner

Languages: (Kotlin,Java,Clojure,Python,Haskell,Rust)

Databases & Messaging: (Postgres,Mongo,Datomic,Cassandra,Kafka,RabbitMQ)

Cloud: (AWS,GCP,Azure)

Infrastructure: (CloudFormation, Terraform, Ansible)

Feel free to get in touch:

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisblomnl/

Email: hackernews@chrisblom.net

That really depends on the Montessori school and how gifted the kid is. Some kids need more challenge that hanging out with older kids, not all Montessori schools are ready to offer this.

There are still tons of domains were GOFAI is very useful, like planning and scheduling, and also in cases where you don't have access to lots of training data or pretrained models.

SEEKING WORK | NL, Remote | Backend, AI, Optimization

I am a dedicated software developer with a background in artificial intelligence and 12 years of experience.

My approach is rooted in a genuine passion for problem-solving: I like to explore and iterate. I run experiments to pick the right option, and then grow it into a mature solution.

I value attention to detail, experimentation, consistent quality, and collaborative teamwork in achieving results.

Key Areas of Proficiency:

- Full-Stack Development with Clojure and ClojureScript: with this stack I can quickly deliver results.

- Backend Systems: I designed and built dozens of stable high-performance backend systems in JVM languages.

- Performance optimization and observability: I can consult on how to measure and improve performance of backend systems.

- Streaming & Messaging: Lots of experience with Kafka, Kafka Streams, and other messaging platforms

- Natural language processing: I worked on several products that extract data from text and unstructured data, also using PDF's as the source.

- Optimization: Utilizing Optaplanner/TimeFold, MiniZinc and Google OR-tools for optimizing routing and scheduling.

If you are seeking a seasoned professional for projects, advice, or potential collaboration, feel free to contact me for a no-obligation consultation.

Github: https://github.com/ChrisBlom/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisblomnl/

Email: hackernews@chrisblom.net

My guess this is just a good 'ol corporate power struggle.

There is no point in speculating until someone shows what the hell Q* even is.

I heard this claim a lot but don't find it true, there is plenty of abandonware with lots of open issues

XTDB is a recent implementation of these ideas. In their docs they call it a bitemporal database, but it seems to match what is called a temporal database in the paper

static typing is a way to manage complexity, Rich Hickey is about avoiding complexity

I still use a 2013 MacBook Pro. Emacs, my favorite editor, is simultaneously outdated and light years into the future

SEEKING WORK | REMOTE (EU timezone)

I'm available for small projects or short consulting gigs, or full-time projects starting 2024.

- Backend expert with 15 years of experience, mostly building big backend systems using JVM languages (Kotlin/Java/Clojure) and rule-based AI.

- I've built several low latency, high volume backend systems for ecommerce, AdTech and IoT data: solid systems that ran for years without major issues.

- Deep experience with Kafka, distributed databases, streaming processing and adjacent tech: designing messaging based architectures, optimizing processes, fixing bottlenecks.

- Modeling complex legal and business rules, experience includes: rule modeling and discrete optimization using Optaplanner & Google OR-tools for employee rostering, a DSL for ad campaigns and a system to detecting fraud in real estate transaction PDF's based on NLP and ontologies.

Keywords: Backend, Functional Programming, Cloud, Kotlin, Java, Clojure, Haskell, Low Latency, High Volume, Kafka, MongoDB, Optaplanner, NLP

See profile for contact details, and here for LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisblomnl/

Back in college I took a class in Prolog.

We had to implement a Sudoku solver and at some point I got stuck. I was trying to bring over my imperative programming mindset, I had written a solver in Java before and I tried to port over the Java code to Prolog, which did not work at all.

So at some point I started over, and wrote some simple Prolog code to check if the Sudoku is valid. Then I realized that I could also run these predicates to solve the Sudoku, and I completed the solver in under 10 lines.

It was a real eureka moment, Prolog is very powerful, but criminally underused in practice, fortunately I had the opportunity to work with Datalog and OWL.

Isn't the BEAM VM on which it runs rather slow?

SEEKING WORK | REMOTE (EU timezone)

I'm available for small projects or short consulting gigs, or full-time projects starting 2024.

- Backend expert with 15 years of experience, mostly building big backend systems using JVM languages (Kotlin/Java/Clojure) and rule-based AI.

- I've built several low latency, high volume backend systems for ecommerce, AdTech and IoT sensor data: solid systems that ran for years without major issues.

- Deep experience with Kafka, distributed databases, streaming processing and adjacent tech: designing messaging based architectures, optimizing processes, fixing bottlenecks.

- Modeling complex legal and business rules, experience includes: rule modeling and discrete optimization using Optaplanner & Google OR-tools for employee rostering, a DSL for ad campaigns and a system to detecting fraud in real estate transaction PDF's based on NLP and ontologies.

Keywords: Backend, Cloud, Kotlin, Java, Clojure, Haskell, Low Latency, High Volume, Kafka, MongoDB, Optaplanner, NLP

See profile for contact details, and here for LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisblomnl/

With logstash I had cases where it was taking more resources than the application that generated the damn logs.

These days i prefer fluentd, but in some cases I let my apps insert directly into ElasticSearch.

Cooking and climbing.

Cooking is something that grew on me, I was a horrible cook when I moved out of my parents house. I just started with simple recipes, learned basic techniques, and expanded from there.

I joined the local climbing association way back in college and loved it. Before climbing, other sports didn't really interest me much. I guess it scratches my puzzle solving itch. I loved being outdoors and travelling to places, but these days I mostly just go bouldering at the local gym.

Logstash is terrible, i've had so many problems with it.

437, accumulated over 2 decades

It was only named 'dynamic programming' because its inventor thought is was a more marketable name:

"I spent the Fall quarter (of 1950) at RAND. My first task was to find a name for multistage decision processes. An interesting question is, ‘Where did the name, dynamic programming, come from?’ The 1950s were not good years for mathematical research. We had a very interesting gentleman in Washington named Wilson. He was Secretary of Defense, and he actually had a pathological fear and hatred of the word, research. I’m not using the term lightly; I’m using it precisely. His face would suffuse, he would turn red, and he would get violent if people used the term, research, in his presence. You can imagine how he felt, then, about the term, mathematical. The RAND Corporation was employed by the Air Force, and the Air Force had Wilson as its boss, essentially. Hence, I felt I had to do something to shield Wilson and the Air Force from the fact that I was really doing mathematics inside the RAND Corporation. What title, what name, could I choose? In the first place I was interested in planning, in decision making, in thinking. But planning, is not a good word for various reasons. I decided therefore to use the word, ‘programming.’ I wanted to get across the idea that this was dynamic, this was multistage, this was time-varying—I thought, let’s kill two birds with one stone. Let’s take a word that has an absolutely precise meaning, namely dynamic, in the classical physical sense. It also has a very interesting property as an adjective, and that is it’s impossible to use the word, dynamic, in a pejorative sense. Try thinking of some combination that will possibly give it a pejorative meaning. It’s impossible. Thus, I thought dynamic programming was a good name. It was something not even a Congressman could object to. So I used it as an umbrella for my activities”.

From: Richard Bellman, Eye of the Hurricane: An Autobiography (1984, page 159)

Another reminder that VC-funded hosting does not last forever. Self-host your mission critical dependencies folks!