Nathan Marz

Rama, the 100x developer platform, is now free for production use! You can download Rama from our website. The free version can run clusters up to two nodes, which is enough to comfortably run small/medium scale applications. Link to blog post with more info in replies.

Red Planet Labs's Rama reduced page load time and write time by 100x All this with less infrastructure: in total their Rama-based implementation reduced their AWS hosting costs by 55%. The power of Clojure compels you blog.redplanetlabs.com/2025/04/22/how…

This was made by a Rama user who gets it

My guess at programmer understanding, in descending order: - What an impedance mismatch is: 50% - That impedance mismatches cause harmful complexity: 25% - That most impedance mismatches are unnecessary: 0.1%

Use a system that has instant migrations and avoid this unnecessary hell in the first place blog.redplanetlabs.com/2024/09/30/mig…

I love getting comments like this. This is what it feels like when the ideas click and the tool goes from "I can't see the value at all because my brain hasn't adapted yet" to "I now get how insanely valuable it is".

Loved this talk! It's true: even very smart people have a hard time seeing the import of new, simple, powerful ideas. I guess because the simpler the idea, the more unassuming the package—and the more unpacking is required?

Fun fact: It's hard to tell, but I gave this keynote on zero sleep thanks to bad jet lag. Was running entirely on fumes. Also, wow, I sure do gesture a lot! Totally unconscious.

The flaws: 1. Specter is also very useful for flat or lightly nested data. 2. Some problem domains naturally involve deeply nested data. Flattening them is either infeasible or would add complexity. 3. Sometimes you don't control the shape of the data (e.g. APIs).

I still see this argument sometimes in the Clojure community: 1. Specter is great at manipulating deeply nested data 2. You shouldn't nest data very deep to begin with 3. Therefore, Specter is useless Do you see the multiple flaws in the logic?

This talk begins with homoiconicity as a simple idea with huge impact ("opens up a new dimension of programming") that most programmers initially perceive as useless or harmful. It then explores four more simple ideas with that same dynamic that greatly simplify software dev.

Here's the video of my keynote "Simple ideas with huge impact from Clojure and Rama" from reClojure two weeks ago. The ideas only take a few seconds to express, but they will seriously challenge how you perceive programming. youtube.com/watch?v=25lJNR…

Released Rama 1.1.0 today. The big new feature is "instant depot migrations", which enables Rama's depots (distributed logs) to be instantly migrated with an arbitrary transformation function. Migrations can also excise records in a fine-grained way. redplanetlabs.com/download

Arrived in London and looking forward to hanging out with the Clojure community here at reClojure!

Most backends today are built on ideas that are deeply ingrained but rarely questioned: 🧱 Fixed data models in databases 🔄 Databases that conflate data and views The result? Mounting complexity over time. @redplanetlabs's Rama changes everything. Here's how 🧵

Had a fun time showing my embarrassing editor setup and talking about Rama on the Apropos podcast youtube.com/watch?v=h8cdxB…

You can book a free 45 minute call with us to pair program or discuss how to apply Rama to your use cases at this Calendly link calendly.com/red-planet-lab…