Rich Hickey
Retired at Self-employed
Town of Mount Pleasant, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
RockstarRich Hickey is a seasoned language designer and systems thinker with 20 years of experience shaping modern software through creation and stewardship of Clojure and related tooling. As the author of Clojure and long-time contributor at Cognitect and Datomic, he combines deep theoretical insight with pragmatic engineering, driving language features, compiler improvements, and database design. His open-source work includes substantial backend contributions to flagship projects like core.async and the ClojureScript compiler—optimizing concurrency primitives and enhancing macro and interop semantics. Previously a distinguished engineer at Nubank and CTO at Cognitect, he has repeatedly translated complex concurrency and data model ideas into production-ready tools. Now retired and based in Mount Pleasant, NY, he remains influential through ongoing authorship and design work that continues to shape functional programming practices.
20 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Github Skills (12)
clojure10
macros10
asynchronous10
compiler-design10
functional-programming10
clojure-cli10
async10
concurrency10
clojurescript10
protocols9
javascript9
transducer9
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
clojure/core.async
May 2013 - Oct 2016
Facilities for async programming and communication in Clojure
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:53 commits, 20 pushes in 3 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Rich primarily focused on developing core backend features and optimizing Clojure code within the core.async library. The contributions included implementing and refining channel operations, concurrency primitives, and transformation functions. The code changes focused on improving the performance and reliability of asynchronous operations, including fixing concurrency-related bugs. Refactoring and enhancements to core features within the library suggest a deep understanding of its architecture and purpose.
non-blockingcommunicationfacilitiesclojurescriptasync
clojure/clojurescript
Jun 2011 - Jul 2011
Clojure to JS compiler
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:93 commits in 1 month
Contributions summary:Rich primarily focused on modifying and enhancing the ClojureScript compiler. Their contributions involved reorganizing code, implementing new features such as `deftype*`, and improving macro expansion. They also worked on features related to protocols, specifically `defprotocol` and `extend-type`, as well as fixing issues around host interop and the `js` and `js*` features.
compilerclojureclojurescript
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