History with Clojure

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I was able to help one of my programming heros with his new language by contributing FFI bindings for Ruby, Java and Clojure.

01 February 2024

YAMLScript FFI Bindings

Programming-Languages Open-source Ruby Java Clojure C FFI

Delon R. Newman—Software, Training and Design

Consulting Software Engineer  · Remote · 3/2021 - Present

Consulting as a software engineer. Mentoring programmers at all levels of experience. Volunteer time each week toward building systems to assist with coordinating community outreach. Also volunteer on open source projects.

  • While helping a team with their React based frontend (without any experience with React) created a custom calendar component that fit their needs after recognizing that the off-the-shelf open source options wouldn’t work for them. Was able to deliver this component ahead of schedule with test coverage and with an array of date utilities that came to be adopted by the team throughout the rest of the code base.

  • Led the development of a Natural Language Processing service to improve the usability of a client’s provider search feature

  • An organization’s management was considering rewriting a legacy Rails application they’d inherited. I suggested that they might consider keeping the legacy app while adapting it to their micro service architecture. Within a few weeks the app was upgraded and Dockerized with the beginnings of test coverage (before this there were no tests). It also now had JSON API, and a new Svelte-based UI (according to organizational standards) with no prior Svelte experience.

  • With no Julia programming experience was able to help a high functioning team improve the quality of their Julia code base and testing which identified a critical production bug

  • Contributed Ruby, Java and Clojure bindings to a new open source programming language

  • Rescued the source code of a running Rails application. The developer had unfortunately disappeared. Was able to collect source code from AWS ElasticBeanstalk deployments (while having to fill in a number of missing pieces). Got it into a Github repository, upgraded from Rails & Ruby, and resolved a number of bugs and issues on it’s Vue.js frontend (having never used Vue.js before this).

Ruby TypeScript JavaScript Rails HTMX React Svelte C Clojure REST AWS NLP Docker Git PostgreSQL Julia Open-source SQL Mentoring Micro-services Web-services Pair-Programming TDD


Various Companies

Freelance Programmer  · Connecticut, Hawai'i, New Mexico · 9/1999 - 9/2019

Got started at 18 years old writing a data conversion script in Perl for my mother’s client in the manufacturing industry.

Clients have included small businesses, universities, staffing agencies (e.g. Robert Half Technology, ALTRES, & TekSystems) and large organizations (e.g. University of New Mexico Hospitals, Central New Mexico Community College, The Department of Veterans Affairs, Time Warner & Master Card) across industries (e.g. retail, marketing, health care, education, research, non-profit) in Connecticut, Hawaii and New Mexico. Have come to specialize in systems integration, business process management, and data-oriented programming.

  • With minimal JavaScript experience at the time built JavaScript heavy dashboards and backend Java / JSP code for a multi-tier system that read sensors in heavy equipment, boats, yachts, and recreational vehicles.

  • Without any Flash or ActionScript experience converted a Flash animation from the website of an aerospace company into a trade show display adding a ticker tape display whose message (which could be edited by a user) would transition between the ticker tape and the original Flash animation/video.

  • Worked on a Java based VoIP heads up display system for a telecommunications company that they had implemented for their help desk staff. It was intermittently crashing without reporting errors. Adding logging, a test suite and cleaning up the code greatly reduced the crashing with errors being reported when it did.

  • Implemented a health insurance integration for a college which involved creating complex SQL queries, creating a custom EDI 834 generator (had to quickly learn the EDI 834 standard over a weekend), and a scheduled upload to the insurance company.

  • Helped an IT Services company move a stalled project forward by creating an integration for Microsoft Exchange, moving their code into source control, and getting them into a bi-weekly sprint cycle.

  • Developed a logging system for a small software company that could handle thousands of requests per second and run on a hosted VPS taking inspiration from Kafka for the logging and using MySQL for permanent storage and querying based on Datalog and the EAV pattern.

Ruby Rails Java JavaScript Perl PHP C# VBA Python Clojure ClojureScript Groovy Oracle MySQL Linux Redhat Jenkins EDI-834 ETL SQL Data-Engineering


Pacific Health Research & Education Institute

Data Manager (Full-time) · Honolulu, Hawai'i · 1/2013 - 1/2016

Performed duties as a member of a research team for a NIH diabetes study (GRADE) including meeting with patients, processing lab specimens, etc. Also, served as IT liaison for the team, and developed custom software to improve day-to-day operations as well as many small scripts and programs for impromptu reporting and data analysis.

  • Developed a workflow and case management system with built-in reporting, scheduling and EHR features while handling other responsibilities as part of the research team.

  • Developed an application that interfaced with a legacy console application (VistA), parsed text reports and generated PDF reports performing tasks in seconds that previously took hours.

  • Coached researchers on creating complex SQL queries to query data-warehouse

Ruby Java JavaScript Clojure Datomic PostgreSQL Git VistA Windows Linux HIPAA Scheduling EHR EMR Workflow Healthcare Health-Research Product-Design Mentoring SQL Microsoft-Access Scheduling-System