Chat with Nubank Engineers. Wait, do they use Clojure?

During our last session of the Programming Languages class we were able to chat with Alexander Aldazabal and Eddú Meléndez, both software engineers at Nubank Mexico. Throughout the conversation, both of the engineers shared with us a lot of information regarding both, what is as well as how does it feels to work at Nu, in addition to the technological stack that characterizes the company. Thus, in this entry, I will display a brief summary of their presentation:

Starting with what Alex presented to us:

  • As an introduction, to Nubank's culture, he mentioned that Nubank is generally misunderstood as a financial company. Nonetheless, Alex stated that Nu was founded and still is a software company whose current solutions are helping the financial market. 
  • He also highlighted the freedom and autonomy that not only you, but the entire engineering team have at the moment of developing new features or products. In addition, he stated that these groups are not made by people who knows or applies the newest technologies, but instead by people who really know their stuff.
  • Furthermore, Alex mentioned the satisfaction and the challenges of working on new reusable solutions. Particularly, and something I found amazing, he mentioned that, although Nubank is an engineering experience as demanding as enjoyable, the company allows people to be people and the mistakes are not as judged or as criticized. Meaning that its culture promotes engineers to really develop risky solutions on interesting problems. 
Finally, Eddu made the conversation spicy and technical by introducing us the technological characteristics of Nubank. Particularly he mentioned that:
  • Clojure is used as the main programming language for two principal reasons: The financial market uses a lot of mathematical functions and Nubank designs its solutions to be run in parallel. Thus, Clojure seemed to be the best choice. Finally, he added that the language's usage is needed due tot the database that the company supports.As I mentioned in my last entry, Russ Olsen's company maintained Clojure and was bought by Nu. This action allowed the Brazilian company to have specialized Clojure developers helping and aiding the engineering team. 
  • Later he started to mention the architecture used in the company (Hexagonal Architecture), the different deployment software used (Docket and Kubernetes), as well as the different databases used (Kafka and Datomic). From this, I could write the technical context in which these different technologies are being used, however, I would like to highlight that these particular stack is what have allowed Nubank to exponentially grow over the past 8 years. 
As a conclusion, I would like to say that i started this course knowing nothing about functional programming and I am ending it wanting to know more. The different companies that are using and looking for people who like this technology, such as Nubank, are as interesting, and as impactful as the most recognized software empires. In this last sentence I just want to thank my teacher, Ariel Ortiz, for introducing me into this marvelous world of Clojure as well as for guiding me during this semester. 

See you in the next semester!!


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