Can you elaborate on how Clojure helped you tackle the complexity? I've considered learning Clojure (I have the Brave Clojure book sitting not far from me) but I have concerns about the learning curve (I'm a fullstack dev by day (C#/Angular) slowing me down in my own attempt to build a SaaS.

Well, off the top of my head:

* a single language for both client-side (browser) code and server-side code

* a single data representation (maps with namespace-qualified keys), so no conversions necessary

* spec which helps validate data in multiple places (such as :pre/:post conditions)

* core.async which lets me write asynchronous code both in the JVM and in the browser, same primitives

* a library of excellent sequence manipulation functions

* transducers, which let me build composable data pipelines

* the Rum library which lets me use React as a rendering engine, basically a function of my data

* most of my domain code is shared between the browser and the server

There is more, but these were what I could come up with immediately.

I mostly spend time thinking and working on the problem domain, not writing boilerplate (there is none in Clojure, really).

I think we might be clones. My self-funded business (https://operatr.io) is built in Clj/Cljs.

From the product, to the static website, marketing emails, even the licensing runs Cljs on Node in AWS Lambda.

I would have listed those same bullet points off the top of my head.

That sounds pretty great. Thanks!

I have a similar background and in Oct 2018, I started spending lots of time learning with that exact book! I first learned Emacs (covered in the book) and it really wasn’t bad at all. I did some tiny fun projects in Clojure, and some exercises on 4clojure. After a couple of months I understood the language and could easily make sense of most of what I saw except core.logic which hardly comes up in practice. Even Heroku has first class support of Clojure, so deployment is trivial for MVPs.

You likely won’t have an issue learning the language, but from my experience, making full stack apps in Clojure is a bit more challenging (compared to .NET and Flask). It’s challenging to figure out what libraries to use for your app, since frameworks are hardly complete and usually outdated in Clojure.