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 — 11 articles, 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 beyond the JVM. Two suites of raylib demos written in two different native Clojures — no JVM in either — each reaching the same C game library the way its own host actually allows.

b12n-raylib-jlt — 75 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. 10 games, 12 in 3D, 32 shapes, 7 generative. 📖 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 — 91 examples in JVM Clojure, over coffi and JDK 22+'s Panama Foreign Function & Memory API. 32 core, 21 models, 18 shapes, 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.

And then teaching it. b12n-gamedev-course is what those 375 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 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 public suites today; the later phases open up as the remaining sibling repos do.

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

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) · dartclojure.el (Dart/Flutter → ClojureDart, in Emacs) · viip · Clojars · RubyGems

Most recent is jolt-lang/jolt itself — 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 both b12n-raylib-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 — 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.}