Senior Principal Engineer at NewsCorp Australia: ClojureDart, AI, full-stack.

Two decades in software, and I have moved with the landscape: Java → Ruby → Clojure → ClojureScript → and most recently ClojureDart for mobile and desktop. Over the past year a tiny team and I have shipped a fleet of production ClojureDart apps for iOS, Android and macOS, alongside Clojure backends and ClojureScript SPAs that share a single mental model end to end.

My current interest is where functional programming meets AI-assisted development: building maintainable agentic workflows in Clojure, and sharing the patterns and pitfalls a small team learns by shipping at pace. When I'm not coding I'm writing experience reports for developers who appreciate the art of elegant, productive engineering.

🗣️ Speaking at Clojure/Conj 2026, and generally available to talk about ClojureDart, MCP/agent tooling, and using LLMs in real engineering workflows. Get in touch.

Production ClojureDart for iOS, Android, and macOS 📅 Friday, October 2 · 9:30–10:10 AM · Room W207CD

Over the past twelve months a tiny team has used ClojureDart (Clojure compiled to Dart, running on Flutter) to build more than a dozen production apps: a document scanner with on-device OpenCV, a transit tracker with realtime GTFS, a venture-capital deck triager with on-device LLM evaluation, a notes app with on-device sentence embeddings, a marketplace, an encyclopedia, a financial charting app, and more. This experience report distills the patterns that survived the trip from prototype to production: a single-atom-plus-:watch architecture that replaces Riverpod and BLoC, a curated catalog of cljd-flutter pitfalls, and a reusable scaffold for new apps.

My second year on the Conj stage.

From Scripts to Buy-In: How Small Clojure Wins Create Big Opportunities

How small, high-impact Clojure automation (AWS workflows, replacing clunky Postman processes, automating Okta SSO) builds the credibility that earns you bigger Clojure opportunities at work.

▶ Watch the talk · 📝 My recap from Charlotte

Clojure Corner — Interview with Burin Choomnuan · Flexiana, on Clojure, tooling, and building things in the open.

I co-host Gen AI Enthusiasts (AI Users), a 2,000+ member online generative-AI community running fortnightly sessions on prompt engineering, AI tooling and news, and practical LLM use.

I write at Clojure Civitas, where 11 articles so far are mostly browser-native ClojureScript with Scittle:

Plus b12n.net ("Lisp's Revenge"), my own blog, built with Clojure/Cryogen, where I keep browser-native slide decks: Mastering Claude Code · Diagrams as Text

ClojureDart in production. More than a dozen apps for iOS, Android and macOS in the past year: on-device OpenCV document scanning, realtime GTFS transit tracking, on-device LLM evaluation and sentence embeddings, charting, marketplaces. Most deployed internally, several bound for the app stores. That's the Conj 2026 talk.

Lisp against the C ABI. Three suites of raylib demos written in three different Clojures, each one reaching the same C game library the way its own host actually allows.

b12n-raylib-jlt: 97 examples in Jolt, native Clojure on Chez Scheme. They call the real libraylib directly over its C ABI through jolt.ffi: no wrapper library, no codegen, no C shim. 32 shapes, 16 core, 16 in 3D, 10 games, 8 generative, 6 shaders. 📖 Docs & full gallery

bb tetris	bb space-invaders	bb boids
bb waving-cubes	bb point-cloud	bb rlgl-solar-system

The interesting part is the ABI. raylib passes structs by value everywhere and Chez's foreign-procedure cannot, so each struct gets the treatment its size actually earns: Color rides in one register as a packed :uint, Camera2D/Camera3D go by pointer, and Vector2/Vector3 geometry is drawn through rlgl's scalar immediate mode.

b12n-raylib-jnk: 209 of the 217 official raylib examples, ported to jank: Clojure compiled to a real native binary through C++/LLVM. The shapes, shaders, audio and text categories are complete. 📖 Docs & full gallery

bb basic-pbr	bb magnifying-glass	bb cel-shading
bb shadowmap-rendering	bb spectrum-visualizer	bb animation-blending

Here there is no FFI at all. (:include "raylib.h") in the ns form hands the real header to the C++ compiler, and raylib becomes ordinary interop: cpp/BeginDrawing, cpp/RAYWHITE, (cpp/Camera3D (cpp/Vector3 ...) ...). The by-value structs that cost Jolt a hand-written marshalling strategy are just constructor calls. No binding DSL, no generated shim.

b12n-raylib-clj: 113 examples in JVM Clojure, over coffi and JDK 22+'s Panama Foreign Function & Memory API. 37 core, 28 shapes, 25 models, 9 games, plus audio, text, textures and shaders. 📖 Docs & full gallery

bb tetris	bb asteroids	bb background-scrolling
bb basic-lighting	bb solar-system	bb lorenz-attractor

This is the one where the runtime does the marshalling for you. A binding is a single defcfn naming the C symbol and its types, and Panama builds the downcall from that description, so the by-value Color that Jolt hand-packs into a :uint is just a {:r 255 :g 0 :b 0 :a 255} map here, serialized from a defalias layout. The seam shows where raylib mutates through a pointer: those calls allocate in a confined-arena, and the arena's lifetime is the one thing the abstraction will not hide from you.

Three hosts, one C library: Chez Scheme, C++/LLVM, and the JVM. Reading the same example three ways is the clearest map I know of where each runtime puts the boundary.

Desktop GUI, the Replicant way. glitter is a GTK4 renderer for Jolt that follows Replicant's model rather than React's: one application-state atom, a pure state -> hiccup view function, top-down re-render on every change, and event handlers that are data: [[:action/inc]], not closures. No component-local state anywhere. 43 widget tags so far; the six demos below are two basics plus four 7GUIs tasks. 📖 Docs & guide

jolt counter	jolt todo	jolt crud
jolt flights	jolt temperature	jolt timer

Immediate-mode GUI, the other shape. raygui-jlt is glitter's opposite number: no retained widget tree at all, just raygui, raylib's companion GUI library, called straight over its C ABI through jolt.ffi, one shared bindings namespace under a suite of small programs. raygui ships as a header only, so there is no library to install: the repo vendors raygui.h and compiles its own. 24 examples across 7 groups (basics, inputs, collections, containers, dialogs, color and styling), each with a committed screenshot. 📖 Docs & full gallery

bb style-selector	bb color-picker	bb floating-window
bb sliders	bb list-view-ex	bb icon-buttons

The whole binding rides one signature: a bounding Rectangle passed by value, application state through a pointer, an int result; 61 functions, nearly all shaped the same, no callbacks and no retained state to own. So the lifetimes almost vanish: a single module-level scratch Rectangle, rewritten before each control, means no example allocates one inside a frame. GuiScrollPanel is the lone exception: two rectangles in one call, where Clojure's left-to-right evaluation would let the second clobber the first, so it gets a buffer of its own. Screenshots rather than GIFs here, deliberately: synthetic clicks do not actuate a raylib window at all, so a recording could never show a button being pressed.

And then teaching it. b12n-gamedev-course is what those 419 raylib examples were for: a free course that teaches Lisp and game programming as one thing, not "game dev, incidentally in Lisp." Six phases take you from never having written a line of Lisp to a capstone, and every lesson builds a real, playable game that teaches a Lisp idiom at the same time. Phase 3 is the one only those three raylib suites make possible: port a game you wrote across all three, and watch the boundary to C move under it. 📖 Read the course

Lesson 1: Pong	Lesson 2: Breakout	Lesson 3: Snake
Lesson 4: Space Invaders	Lesson 5: Tetris	Lesson 6: Flappy Bird

Those are the course's own games, running from its exercises/ code on its own vendored engine: the thing a student actually ends up with, not a borrowed screenshot. Lessons are CC BY-SA 4.0 and the code EPL-2.0, so teaching from it at a meetup or a classroom needs nothing from me. Phases 0 to 3 stand on the three raylib suites today; the later phases open up as the remaining sibling repos do.

Clojure meets AI. Agentic workflows, MCP servers, and LLM-driven developer tooling are where most of my time goes now. A lot of that work is private for the moment, so the patterns tend to surface in talks and articles before the code does.

Public bits: b12n-gamedev-course · b12n-raylib-jlt · b12n-raylib-jnk · b12n-raylib-clj · glitter (Replicant-style GTK4 for Jolt) · raygui-jlt (immediate-mode GUI for Jolt) · dartclojure.el (Dart/Flutter → ClojureDart, in Emacs) · viip · Clojars · RubyGems

Most recent is jolt-lang/jolt itself, with 15 commits across July and August 2026 to the Clojure-on-Chez-Scheme host: :string carrying NULL in both directions through the FFI, fiber-parking for subprocess pipe I/O, and a cross-compilation path (tarm64osx → ta6osx via Chez xpatch, macOS → Linux via zig cc) with a CI cross-smoke workflow behind it. It is the runtime under b12n-raylib-jlt, raygui-jlt and glitter, so the patches tend to fall out of building on it.

Longer-running: contributions to babashka/process, bhauman/clojure-mcp, zero-one-group/geni, BrunoBonacci/graalvm-clojure, yogthos/Selmer, clojure-emacs/clomacs, dundalek/closh, juxt/mach, apache/incubator-mxnet, and others.

📌 Two handles, one person. @agilecreativity is my original account, from before I found Clojure, and a lot of my older OSS commits live there. @burinc is where I work now.

_{Lisp · Clojure · ClojureDart · Emacs · and a stubborn belief that small tools compound.}