Announcing Board Nominations

By Daniel Compton

Clojurists Together is in the process of electing new board members as half of our existing board members finish their term.

After accepting applications for nominations, we received 16 applications from candidates. These candidates were all talented Clojurists that we would love to have on the board.

Our bylaws state:

The Board shall nominate no more than 12 candidates seeking board membership in any given election. In nominating candidates for Director positions and in choosing the number of candidates to nominate overall, the Board shall use reasonable efforts to maintain a Board composition consisting of at least: (1) 25% female Directors, (2) 25% non-Caucasian Directors, and (3) 35% from any category(ies) of persons (e.g., race, gender, ability) commonly considered to have suffered from discrimination at some time and then-currently under-represented in the technology industry, in each case as determined by the Board in its reasonable discretion.

The board has nominated the following 12 candidates for the current board election:

Next Steps

All current Clojurists Together members will be shortly receiving their ballot to vote. If you haven’t received a ballot by Monday, 12th April, please contact hi@clojuriststogether.org.

Voting will close on Monday 19th April, 2021 at midnight Pacific Time. The top four candidates, as voted on by members will win. We will announce the winners shortly afterwards and you’ll be able to meet them at the Annual members meeting at 9am Pacific time, April 29th, 2021.

Candidate Profiles

Below we have published the candidates applications:

Alan Thompson - Looking Glass

Why they’d like to join

I have been committed to improving software engineering for over 25 years. As part of this effort, I have presented at Clojure/Conj on 4 occasions and am one of the top 20 contributors on StackOverflow for Clojure questions.

Bio

Alan Thompson is an Electrical Engineer and Software Developer with experience in numerous DoD and commercial projects. He has been addicted to Clojure since 2013 and is the maintainer of the Tupelo Clojure library, among others. He has seen many (if not most) ways for software development to fail, and is a deep believer in iterative development, automated testing, and good design.

Ashima Panjwani

Why they’d like to join

I have previously received funding from the Clojurists Together to work on Clojisr during Q4 of 2020. I’m extremely grateful for this opportunity and would like to give back to the community by helping out wherever possible.

Bio

Ashima Panjwani is a self-taught programmer working at Blackhawk Network (Bangalore Center), delivering branded payment solutions. In her free time, she contributes to various open-source projects (ClojisR, Tablecloth, etc.) in the Clojure Data Science ecosystem.

Chris Nuernberger - TechAscent

Why they’d like to join

I think Clojure has a lot of potential in places where it hasn’t seen much success and I would like to drive it that direction.

Bio

Chris has a strong background in high performance computing and machine learning and has built many opensource libraries such as libpython-clj and tech.ml.dataset that support moving Clojure more towards data analytics and cutting edge machine learning.

Dan Sutton - Metabase

Why they’d like to join

I’ve been involved with the Clojure community for five years now. I love helping new people and supporting developers. I’ve helped with CIDER and answering questions and adding features for that same amount of time. I’m quite invested in the long term stability of the Clojure community and would enjoy helping in this capacity.

Bio

My name is Dan Sutton. I’ve been involved in the Clojure community for about six years now. I originally purchased a copy of Brave and True and got my .NET company to send me to Seattle for Clojure West. My language of choice has been Clojure ever since and I’ve greatly enjoyed this community. It’s contemplative, innovative, and welcoming. I love the effort of this endeavor and would love to contribute as I can.

Daniel Compton - GitHub

Why they’d like to join

I was a founder of Clojurists Together and for many years was the primary driver of our funding activities. Last year, together with lvh, we formed the 501(c)6 Clojurists Together Foundation. I’ve spoken at conferences about Clojurists Together and open source sustainability.

I have a deep understanding of how the organisation runs and the open source Clojure community. If re-elected, I will work with the rest of the board to continue strengthening open-source Clojure.

Bio

Daniel Compton is a founder of Clojurists Together and has been serving first as project leader and then Treasurer. He has contributed widely to open source Clojure code. He works at GitHub on GitHub Sponsors, helping companies and developers fund their dependencies.

Daniel Slutsky - Localize

Why they’d like to join

I think CT has an important role in nurturing the Clojure ecosystem.

CT’s support has already affected numerous important projects, and in some situations, it can be really transformative. It may allow the extra attention that some projects need for maturing well. For new contributors, it may give the substantial push that is needed for getting involved in the details and becoming comfortable as maintainers.

Clojure has a hopeful prospect of becoming friendlier, well-known, and widely used by broader audiences. A few of us are discussing that continuously at Scicloj and planning some possible paths to get there. It will be difficult but doable, I think. CT’s support will surely serve an important role in that, and I want to help in making that happen.

In the last two years, I have been involved in building some parts of the Clojure ecosystem, mainly through community building and library maintenance at Scicloj. I have also worked closely with two developers during their CT projects.

Hopefully, my experience as an organiser – in open source communities as well as in local grassroots communities throughout the years – can serve CT well in thinking about projects and the human dynamics around them.

Bio

Daniel Slutsky is a mathematician and a programmer. Currently, his main activity is in the organising team of the Scicloj community, which is building some parts of the Clojure ecosystem for data science. He has been one of the main developers of the Clojisr library and Notespace tool and has supported a few community members in becoming active contributors to libraries such as Tablecloth and tech.ml.dataset. Alongside his work as a software developer and a data scientist throughout the years, Daniel has been a political activist and a community organiser in local social movements. Daniel works part-time at Localize in a data-science team in the field of urban geography. He is also beginning his path as a yoga teacher.

Erik Assum - Ardoq AS

Why they’d like to join

I am an active member of the Clojure community, both as a speaker and maintainer of several project, especially through my work with clj-commons. I believe that there is room for other ways than the three months grants of sponsoring important Clojure OSS projects, and would like to work with exploring different options in this area.

Bio

Erik Assum is a tech lead at Ardoq, he’s been programming in a variety of languages over the last 25 years. He’s enthusiastic about programming, project management, and problem solving in general. Through his work with clj-commons, he’s been able to use his love for maintenance programming for the greater good of the Clojure community.

Heather Moore-Farley

Why they’d like to join

I’m interested in joining the Clojurists Together Committee because I’ve really benefitted from some of the projects that Clojurists Together has supported in the past and I’d love to have a part in supporting more projects. I’m at a point in my life where I want to contribute more to the community around me and this feels like a good way to do that. I’ve been on non-profit boards before and I know the work of board meetings and prep and followups isn’t glamorous, but is really important for organizations to feel like they are going somewhere, and for increasing a feeling of community. I think it can be easy to feel like a lone developer working on a project, but knowing groups like CT are supporting projects can alleviate that a bit. And CT can’t support projects without a committee.

Bio

Heather is a software engineer, knitter, and bicyclist. She has been coding with Clojure and Clojurescript full-time for 3 years at Mayvenn. In her 6 years of professional software development, she has both benefitted from and contributed to open source projects.

Ikuru Kyogoku - Parkside

Why they’d like to join

In short, I want the following to happen with Clojurists Together:

I believe I am a good fit because beyond my professional Clojure experience, I can contribute to the diversity of the community by reaching the Clojure community in Japanese.

Bio

Ikuru Kyogoku is a U.S. based Software Engineer working at Parkside developing a trading platform on Kafka and Datomic.

Before that he has been a Clojure developer by trade in Japan since 2016 at various places developing webapps (frontend & backend) and a little bit on a react native app(re-natal).

Kenny Williams - Compute Software

Why they’d like to join

As a Clojurists Together Committee member, I hope to represent small companies built on Clojure and its ecosystem. I co-founded Compute Software in 2017, and we rely heavily on open source libraries (e.g., re-frame, shadow-cljs, reitit, & more). I owe much our ability to deliver product quickly to Clojure and the rich ecosystem of open source Clojure(Script) libraries.

Bio

Kenny Williams is a software engineer and co-founder at Compute Software. He has a background in designing, building, and operating SaaS B2B products. He has built several products from the ground up entirely using Clojure. At Compute Software, he leads the engineering team in building their cloud optimization platform.

Kira McLean - Self employed, contract with Swirrl

Why they’d like to join

I’ve been working with Clojure full time for about 2 years now and am pretty keen to stick with it as my primary language. I love the language and the community, and am looking for ways to give back. I think I would be a good fit because I have big hopes and dreams for Clojure. I want to see the language and community thrive and think I could help. Admittedly some of this is selfish because I would really love to be able to keep getting paid to write Clojure forever, but I’m more motivated by the possibility of helping to teach more new Clojure programmers and introduce it to people who might not otherwise consider it. I think I could also offer a useful, maybe different perspective as a young(ish), less experienced Clojurian.

Bio

Kira is a software developer from Montreal, Canada, currently working with Swirrl building tools for publishing open data on the web. She’s passionate about open data and open standards, and dreams of an internet that mostly works.

Shriphani Palakodety - Onai

Why they’d like to join

I’ve used clojure in a variety of academic and professional settings. I used clojure for a first of its kind scraping and machine learning use-case at Kimono labs (acquired by Palantir). Subsequently, I used Clojure for a variety of state of the art natural language processing and program-synthesis problems at Onai. A couple of these resulted in publications at top computer science venues. I have experience managing clojure codebases, helping teams adopt and successfully deploy clojure in the domains of AI, frontend and other additional use-cases like formal methods, and model checking. Besides engineering work, I have a successful track record of AI research, and formal methods research (organizing workshops at NASA in formal methods and cryptography).

Bio

Shriphani Palakodety (Onai) is a software engineer, sculptor and cartographer. His primary research focus is low resource natural language processing, formal methods, and cryptography. He organized the first workshop on formal methods for cryptography at the NASA Formal Methods conference in 2020. His work on low-resource NLP with applications to refugee crises was covered in international press outlets. Shriphani’s maps and cartography have been covered in major news outlets in India and his geospatial work and resources are widely used by GIS practitioners. His sculptures have been displayed at galleries in the Bay Area, California and Vancouver, British Columbia.