Metosin Alumni Begin!
IntroductionLink to Introduction
I have been working at Metosin for almost three years now. But this autumn, I decided that it was time to move on. I am leaving Metosin in one week and moving to another company. Metosin HR asked me if I would like to write a farewell blog post that also starts a "Metosin Alumni Blog Series." I was happy to answer that I would write that blog post. Now that I'm leaving Metosin, it is an excellent time to reflect on these past three years.
First YearLink to First Year
Three years ago, I wanted to learn Clojure, and I joined Metosin because the company is one of the most prominent Clojure shops on this planet. My first weeks at Metosin were really lovely - everyone at Metosin was friendly and made it smooth for me to start working at the company.
My first project at Metosin was an interesting public sector project. The project was quite big, comprising various teams. I started working in the infrastructure team developing the required infrastructure on AWS. Later on, I joined the Clojure team since Clojure was the very reason I joined Metosin in the first place. Working in the Clojure team and learning Clojure full stack development from the Metosin specialists was really wonderful. I learned so much about Clojure in this project, and of course, I wrote blog posts regarding those lessons, e.g., Clojure Power Tools Part 1 and Clojure Power Tools Part 2.
Metosin invests in various technologies and starts short internal projects to evaluate and gather experience about those technologies. In the first year, I did one of those short technology projects with Kimmo Koskinen regarding how to provide a Terraform ECS example which can be used at Metosin to provide a quick template to setup cloud infrastructure runtime for applications running on AWS.
Second YearLink to Second Year
My second Metosin year started with an exciting idea: Let's write a blog post regarding Metosin’s favorite editors. It was so much fun to do the interviews. These guys are hilarious. I hope you can get the feeling while reading that blog post.
The public sector project ended for me in the summer, and I left for my summer vacation. When I returned to work, there was an exciting Internet of Things project waiting for me; you can read more about that project in blog posts AWS IoT first reflections and AWS IoT Storage Considerations. It was an interesting project - I had a chance to work with AWS, IoT, CDK, Terraform and do Clojure full-stack development.
In November, I got an idea while reading the Metosin slack. The company is full of competent developers willing to help each other. Together we are stronger and form a kind of superorganism that is as a community more powerful than its parts as individuals. As an old-timer backend developer, I could implement a not-so-trivial frontend application with various graphs and visualizations with the help of Metosin frontend specialists. It was a great feeling to do that project and learn from other Metosin specialists! And naturally, I wrote a blog post regarding what I had learned: Clojurescript frontend development for novices.
Third YearLink to Third Year
Third year at Metosin was full of international startups. I worked with Clojure and Datomic database in the first international client project. Datomic is an interesting transactional database that uses Datalog as a query language. I wrote a blog post regarding Datalog: Clojure & Datalog is Lisp & Prolog. In the second international client project, I worked with a Metosin colleague to implement a cloud infrastructure and a Clojure frontend application to provide a dynamic publishing environment for the client. I worked with the client's GCP infrastructure in the third international client project using Pulumi with Typescript.
ConclusionsLink to Conclusions
Now that I look back on my Metosin journey, it has been an incredible three years. I have had a chance to work on interesting Clojure & cloud projects and learn a lot of interesting new technologies, full-stack Clojure development being the most interesting of these lessons.
If you are looking for a Clojure shop where you can work with Clojure and learn from the best, don't hesitate to contact mikko.heikkila@metosin.fi.
