Long-term funding selections

By Daniel Compton

Clojurists Together is excited to announce that our members have selected six developers to each receive $1,500 USD/month for 12 months ($108,000 in total):

Background

Recently, we talked to developers to understand how Clojurists Together could better serve them. One of the things we heard was that developers were looking for more flexibility and stability in funding, and that they appreciated Cognitect’s funding model.

In response, we have created a new long-term funding program alongside our existing project grants - giving funded developers $1.5k/month for 12 months. We think that giving developers flexible, long-term funding will give them the space to do high impact work. This might be continuing maintenance on existing projects, new feature development, or perhaps a brand new project. We’re excited to see what they come up with!

The recipients of the long-term funding were voted on by Clojurists Together members. These new selections join our existing support for Toby Crawley working on Clojars.

Possible projects

We asked the selected developers about what they might do over the next 12 months with this funding:

Bozhidar Batsov - I plan to work on bringing nREPL to version 1.0 and on adding support for newer nREPL functionality to CIDER. Apart from that - I want to improve working with Java sources and javadoc, simplify session management and extend the documentation. There are many other things that are bound to happen along the way, but those are some of the ideas that I’m thinking more about lately.

Michiel Borkent - With the funding I’ll keep improving clj-kondo, babashka and SCI, scittle, nbb and various other OSS projects.

Dragan Djuric - My first project will be a Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) implementation for Deep Diamond. The next thing would be sparse matrix support for Neanderthal. After that, I’d love to support JavaCPP-provided libraries as an additional backend for MKL and CUDA in Neanderthal, (which would also enable arm64 support). There are numerous improvements that could (and would) be done along the way, but this would also be a nice opportunity to get the community more involved and motivate people to suggest ideas.

Thomas Heller - I’ll continue doing the ongoing maintenance and support I’m already doing on Shadow CLJS and hopefully get some more documentation stuff done (eg. restore the homepage).

David Nolen - I maintain ClojureScript and various official ClojureScript libraries. Maintaining ClojureScript includes managing reported issues (bugs, changes, enhancements), staying up-to-date with Google Closure Compiler and Library changes, maintaining the release process (the ClojureScript build on build.clojure.org), communicating with tooling developers to decrease churn, helping new developers contribute, maintaining the website, and actively evangelizing the project.

Nikita Prokopov - I have a Clojure UI framework planned for the next year, this would be a perfect fit.

Thanks

We couldn’t have done this without the support of our members. We are very grateful to everyone who has supported us over the years and helped us build up Clojurists Together to the point that we could make this commitment to developers. When we first announced this program we had income to support three developers, but thanks to new members Whimsical and AppsFlyer, we have been able to extend this to six developers!

The power of Clojure and quality tools have allowed Whimsical to thrive. We’re excited to contribute back to the language and community that has helped make all of this possible.
– Jānis Peisenieks, Head of Engineering, Whimsical

AppsFlyer has been using Clojure for over 8 years, since we were just two developers strong, till now, when we’re more than 300. We felt it would only be appropriate to give back to the community not just via code, but by financially enabling amazing people and projects from various locations around the globe who have one main goal in sight - making Clojure better for all of us. We’re proud to support this wonderful community and are looking forward to seeing what developments are in store!
– Nir Rubinstein, Chief Architect, AppsFlyer

We also want to thank our other major members: Latacora, Roam, Pitch, Nubank, Cisco, JUXT, Metosin, Solita, Adgoji, Nextjournal, Flexiana, Toyokumo, Griffin, and Parkside, along with all of our other company and developer members who have funded this work, and voted on the recipients.

We couldn’t be more excited about the next phase of Clojurists Together, and seeing what these developers will create.