Clojure The Secret Weapon for Healthcare Startups
It’s no secret that more and more startups are choosing Clojure for their applications – but why? I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Derek Sakamoto, CTO of Snap eHealth to have a conversation about how Clojure has transformed his product, what he’s learned since adopting the technology, and the results it has had on his engineering team’s culture.
Snap eHealth is a health tech startup helping patients share their healthcare data with their physicians by building a product that helps patients and providers communicate, promote, report, and measure requirements and outcomes for preventive medicine.
A Brief Overview: the tech, its roots, and exponential growth
Clojure, developed by Rich Hickey and introduced in 2007, is a functional programming language that runs on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Running on the JVM allows it to run on many systems and platforms and have access and interoperability with the Java language and all its libraries and frameworks, which provides an enormous ecosystem of tools for developers.
From a business use case perspective, it provides rich features for building concurrent applications, making it a very attractive option for companies who need to handle large amounts of data or traffic – which in today’s market, is nearly everyone. Another advantage of choosing Clojure for your business is the type of talent it attracts and the culture it builds within your organization (we’ll dig into more of that later).
Clojure is not only climbing in popularity among developers but is also seeing a rapid increase in use, both in startups and companies with over 1000 employees, proving its ability to scale as your application and organization evolve. Of those companies, financial services and healthcare have seen the most significant growth in adopting Clojure for their organization, with Nubank spearheading the way and serving as true evangelists of how Clojure can transform your business.
Why Clojure is the perfect fit for start-ups – a CTO’s perspective
Less complexity. More Power.
“Simplicity is a prerequisite for reliability” (Rich Hickey, author of Clojure)
One aspect that engineers find attractive with Clojure is how expressive the language is. A lot of functionality can be expressed with a small amount of code. For example, there are threading macros that allow creating very simple-to-read complex functional pipelines which enables reviewing and understanding code much simpler.
Attract Talent and Build Culture
Clojure is a magnet for passionate, out-of-the-box problem solvers who are genuinely interested in technology. During my discussion with Derek, a consistent theme was how incredible the talent pool proves to be within the Clojure community. Not only do Clojure engineers consistently outperform technically, but they tend to have a true love of helping others solve problems. This energy is infectious and Derek has seen firsthand how it has transformed his engineering team culture. When starting a company, it’s every founder’s dream to have a team that is passionate about what they do, is inclusive and supportive of their peers, and promotes a culture of innovation – a Clojure culture is exactly this. Derek explained that he is a “believer in that, within a degree of margin, you can choose any tech stack for your product and make it work,” however after witnessing the technical impact Clojure has had on his product, along with the way the community has shaped his engineering team, he couldn’t imagine having gone with any other technology to bring his vision to life.
Ready to harness the power of Clojure for your startup, but not sure where to start?
ThorTech has been in business for 20+ years and using Clojure since its inception. We have a deep understanding of the Clojure community, a large network of Clojure candidates, as well as an in-house Clojure consulting team. Schedule a zero-commitment Discovery Call here and let us help you build the product and team of your dreams.