{"id":26759,"date":"2020-07-23T12:01:55","date_gmt":"2020-07-23T12:01:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/building.nubank.com\/nubank-and-cognitect-a-personal-perspective\/"},"modified":"2024-05-22T17:13:44","modified_gmt":"2024-05-22T17:13:44","slug":"nubank-and-cognitect-a-personal-perspective","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/building.nubank.com\/es\/nubank-and-cognitect-a-personal-perspective\/","title":{"rendered":"Nubank and Cognitect: a personal perspective"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I\u2019m excited to announce that Nubank and Cognitect are joining forces.  Please refer to the press release<\/a> announcing the transaction for additional details. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a Co-founder of Nubank, a software engineer, and an enthusiastic supporter of Clojure and Datomic<\/a> (and perhaps more importantly, the remarkable clarity of the thinking underlying these technologies), I\u2019d like to complement what\u2019s been written publicly with a personal perspective.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But first, it is important to make one thing very clear: Clojure is and will remain open-source and Rich Hickey will continue to lead its efforts (as the BDFL). We are thrilled to work with such an inspiring group and very excited about supporting Rich\u2019s vision for the language. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

History: Cognitects and Nubankers<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

At Nubank our mission is to \u201cFight complexity to empower people.\u201d We\u2019ve started making that mission a concrete reality in financial services, an industry renowned for domain complexity, legacy, information asymmetry, systemic risk, and national sovereignty coming together to produce incoherent and suboptimal outcomes for normal people. Financial integration is a fundamental component of the social infrastructure for modern life, so this matters. I remain optimistic about what we can achieve through a deeper rethinking of how we build these solutions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sitting down in 2013 with a blank sheet of paper to think about how we might build a different sort of financial institution, three things were reasonably clear:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \n
  1. Small and middling outcomes were unlikely to work – Nubank would need to reach high scale to effectively compete with incumbents;<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  2. The largest threat to reaching scale, from a technical perspective, was likely to be complexity, for both the system and the team;<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  3. Explicitly constraining and mitigating certain categories of complexity (e.,g., accidental mutable state, non-strategic variance in style\/approach, Conway\u2019s Law) was likely to pay off in the medium and long term.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    I\u2019d love to claim that many other aspects of how the next 7 years would play out were clear from the start, but these three will have to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Against this backdrop, searching for powerful ideas and tools on which to build, I remember reading the classic \u201cOut of the Tarpit<\/a>\u201d paper and asking \u201cwhat about the database?<\/em>\u201d. This line of inquiry led us to discover Datomic, which in turn led us to Clojure.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    At the time, I\u2019d never coded in Clojure, nor had anyone else on the early engineering team. We weren\u2019t able to rely on historical experience to guide the decision, because none of us had built something comparable. But everyone had experienced accidental complexity, and the alignment with our problem space and strategic principles was excellent. We took the leap and have never regretted it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Present: Nubank scale and challenges<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

    By some measures, Nubank is one of world\u2019s largest students of these powerful ideas: <\/p>\n\n\n\n