Johnny Stevenson
Founder & Chief Fun Officer at Practicalli
Stony Stratford, England, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJohnny Stevenson is a seasoned software engineering leader and founder with more than two decades of hands-on development across Java/JVM, .NET, Python and a functional programming focus in Clojure since 2017. As Founder & Chief Fun Officer of Practicalli he creates widely used Clojure learning resources, workshops and tooling while running a low-cost, community-supported publishing setup. He’s held senior engineering and architecture roles at companies from Heroku and Citi to fintechs like Billie, blending delivery, platform and data experience with lean-agile practises to build high-performing teams. An active community organiser and speaker in London, he helped grow multiple developer communities and runs long-running events such as HackTogetherLDN and ClojureBridge workshops. His open-source contributions include enhancing Spacemacs Clojure layers and maintaining Clojure CLI configs to improve developer experience. Outside work he’s an endurance cyclist—he rode Lands End to John O’Groats (1,000 miles, 53,000 ft ascent) in nine days—bringing the same steady, disciplined approach to engineering and community-building.
14 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
Bsc (Hons), Software Engineering, Bsc (Hons), Software Engineering at Newcastle University
Github Skills (16)
clojure10
configuration-management10
configurations10
emacs10
keybindings10
configuration-file10
clojure-cli10
spacemacs10
emacs-lisp10
cider10
nrepl9
git9
ls8
spellchecking8
version-control7
Programming languages (25)
Github contributions (5)
practicalli/clojure-cli-config
Jan 2023 - Mar 2023
User aliases and Clojure CLI configuration for deps.edn based projects
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:23 releases, 17 reviews, 40 commits in 1 month
Contributions summary:Johnny primarily contributes to the configuration and management of the Clojure CLI tool within the `practicalli/clojure-cli-config` repository. Their commits demonstrate a focus on modifying and updating alias definitions in `deps.edn` files, aimed at simplifying workflows and deprecating unused configurations. Furthermore, they update dependencies, add supporting libraries, and refactor formatting tools to align with best practices. The impact of their work is aimed at improving developer experience and streamlining the Clojure development process.
clojure-cliclojuredeps-edn
practicalli/spacemacs-config
Dec 2015 - Jan 2023
rich Clojure & LSP config for Spacemacs
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:1 release, 303 commits, 5 PRs in 7 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Johnny primarily focused on configuring and modifying the Spacemacs Emacs configuration, demonstrating a strong understanding of the Emacs Lisp environment and Spacemacs layer structure. They added and removed layers to customize the editor's functionality, including features like autocompletion, Clojure support, and version control. The user's contributions involved theming the editor, customizing the Doom modeline, and integrating tools like clj-kondo for Clojure linting and enhancing the user's overall coding experience.
clojurespacemacsemacslsp
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