The default onboarding experience for new employees at many companies is terrible. I once worked at a company where some new software engineers didn’t get a computer for a couple of days. That’s only acceptable if when doing some kind of Vince Lombardi inspired fundamentals first program: “This is a desk. This is a chair. Tomorrow we’ll go over where the bathrooms are. You’ll touch a keyboard after 2 weeks.”
One piece of unattributed wisdom that's stuck with me is "don't take more than one technology bet". At Ladder, our big bet is using Clojure for fullstack app development. Ladder's used Clojure since day 1 in 2015, and we wouldn't want it any different! In particular, Clojure's Lisp heritage, focus on pure functions and immutable data structures, unified client-server support, and superior developer experience have helped us write higher quality code faster.
When demoing a feature to product, stakeholders, or other engineers, it's often useful to have multiple sessions open at a time. A common approach is to use the browser's private browsing mode, such as Chrome's incognito or Firefox's private windows. This can cause issues, however, when the demo necessitates more than two sessions, or you would like to prepare multiple scenarios ahead of time.
At Ladder, we use Datomic as our primary data store and Google BigQuery as our data warehouse. We've iterated on how we send data from Datomic to BigQuery - starting from a nightly job dumping every entity and ending with a streaming solution with just seconds of latency. In this blog post, we'll walk through bucketing Datomic entities into BigQuery tables, transforming entities into rows, and using one of Datomic's superpowers to stream changed entities into BigQuery.
Ladder recently rolled out the Ladder API as part of our one year launch anniversary, and with that, we had to decide up front how we were going to tackle keeping documentation in sync with reality.
