21 January 2026
Happy belated new year! The Datomic team was among the six hundred participants at Clojure/Conj 2025. Here are some highlights.
A Decade on Datomic was full of lessons from Davis Shepherd and Jonathan Indig’s experience at Netflix. This is a technical talk with plenty of detail on how to leverage the semantics of a "deconstructed" database to design solutions for distributed systems challenges. We’ve put together a transcript for those who prefer a written version.
Tim Pote took us onto the warehouse floor in Forklifts, Facts, and Functions (transcript). He illustrated how Datomic’s flexible schema and queryable history gave him the leverage to solve bugs simply and easily.
Darlei Soares and João Nascimento showed how they used Datomic to model Nubank microservices in Immutable Knowledge Databases (transcript), revealing dependency patterns, risks and opportunities.
Our hands-on workshop is back. Based on Stuart Halloway’s original Day of Datomic, the event was led by Nubank engineers Hanna Figueiredo and Carol Silva.
Our priority for the session was to incorporate the latest features and architectural insights. Feedback was overwhelmingly positive, with 100% of participants reporting improved mastery, specifically praising the combination of architectural “deep dives” and practical challenges. We appreciate everyone who took part and made it so interactive. The workshop remains one of our favorite ways to help developers gain a solid base of understanding Datomic’s unique power.
Dustin Getz’s tour of A Datomic entity browser for prod (transcript) was electrifying. The tool is part programmable spreadsheet and part visual graph explorer, with features like query monitoring and a powerful query DSL to make a smooth developer experience. We’re eager to see where this power will be applied.
Benjamin Kamphaus’s Power Tools for Translational Data Science (transcript) was a more philosophical talk. It weaves historical linguistics, computational phylogenetics, constraint satisfaction, and the biology of rare cancers into a parable on why it matters how we build our tools.
It builds on his prior talks about his data science toolkit, Clojure Where it Counts: Tidying Data Science Workflows (with Pier Federico) and Building a Unified Cancer Immunotherapy Data Library (with Lacey Kitch), both of which dive more into the technical advantages that Clojure and Datomic provide.
Thanks to the organizers, speakers, and everyone who made the Conj such a vibrant time. We hope to see you there next year!
