People
Meet the amazing people behind Macroexpand 2025! Our conferences bring together speakers, organizers, and community members who are passionate about growing Clojure in data science and AI.
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Pierre Baille
Macroexpand-Noj Speaker
Pierre comes from a music background and transitioned to programming gradually by trying to generate music. He works at Endor Global and is interested in generative music/graphics and programming languages.
Tomas Baranek
Macroexpand-Noj Speaker
Tomáš Baránek is a blend of publisher and programmer who brings a beginner's curiosity to data science with Clojure. As co-founder of Jan Melvil Publishing, he leads a small independent house that has released over 166 high-quality non-fiction titles since 2007, with average sales of 10,000 copies per book. Tomáš graduated in Mathematical Informatics from Masaryk University in 1996, and after decades in publishing, returned to coding in 2022—working almost exclusively in Clojure. His background bridges technical and literary worlds, allowing him to approach basket analysis from both perspectives: as a publisher seeking business insights and as a programmer exploring Scicloj's capabilities. In 2021, he co-founded Servantes, developing software for modern publishers worldwide. This presentation reflects his recent journey, having attended machine learning classes at his alma mater last year, and represents his practical experiments applying these concepts to his publishing business with Clojure tools. He lives in the Czech Republic, in city of Brno.
Cameron Barre
Macroexpand-Deep Speaker
Cameron Barre has been a professional Clojure developer since 2016 and is currently CTO at a small consultancy in the AI engineering space called ObneyAI.
Monty Bichouna
Macroexpand-Deep Speaker
Monty is an aspiring compiler engineer who enjoys Lisps and always wanted a reason to learn Clojure. He found an excellent reason with jank, the native Clojure dialect.
Matthias Buehlmaier
Macroexpand-Noj Speaker • Macroexpand-Deep Speaker
Matthias Buehlmaier is an associate professor of teaching in finance and the BBA(IBGM) program director at HKU Business School, University of Hong Kong (HKU). He is a winner of several teaching and research awards, e.g. the Outstanding Teaching Award and the Teaching Innovation Award granted by HKU. His research has appeared in the Review of Financial Studies (Oxford University Press) and has been featured in the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation.
Eric Dallo
Macroexpand-Deep Speaker
Eric Dallo is a Emacs, NixOS fanatic, he loves programming, especially when focused on dev tooling, He maintains clojure-lsp, ECA, deps-bin, lsp-mode, and other related libraries, Eric works with Clojure at Nubank and currently is focused on AI pair programming multi-editors with ECA.
Sessions:
Tiril Elstad
Macroexpand-Noj Speaker
Tiril is a medical doctor, HRV researcher, yoga teacher and CEO of Endor Global. Her interest is holistic health and well-being.
Josh Glover
Macroexpand-Deep Speaker
Josh is a software engineer, engineering leader, podcast host, and union organiser hailing from Stockholm. A technology enthusiast from early in life, he has been becoming increasingly aware of the social impacts of technology. He advocates a Luddite perspective, where the worth of technologies is determined by whether they contribute to or detract from human thriving.
Sessions:
Harold
Macroexpand-Noj Speaker
Owner: TechAscent - Mathematician | Software Engineer | Cloud (AWS) | Clojure | JS | Data Science | AI/ML
Sessions:
Bruce Hauman
Macroexpand-Deep Speaker
Bruce Hauman is a prolific toolmaker and long-time contributor to the Clojure community, perhaps best known as the creator of Figwheel—the build tool that introduced live code reloading and made real-time browser development a reality for ClojureScript developers. Bruce’s legendary 2014 “Flappy Bird” demo not only turned heads, but set a new standard for interactive coding, enabling developers to see their changes instantly and stay in the creative flow. Bruce also built Devcards, a library for interactive documentation that brings a visual REPL experience to ClojureScript, and Rebel Readline, the feature-rich REPL for Clojure and ClojureScript, complete with syntax highlighting, code completion, and inline documentation. Bruce’s latest project, Clojure MCP, tackles the next frontier: enabling AI assistants to work Clojure projects by connecting directly to live REPLs, providing real-time feedback and validation to improve the quality of AI-generated Clojure code. Beyond his tool building chops, Bruce is guided by a profound respect for users and a conviction that developer tooling should be radically better—simple, powerful, and joyful to use. He’s also a fan of the outdoors: an avid canoe tripper, Appalachian Trail thru-hiker, and, currently, the hands-on renovator of a former church-turned-home in Saskatchewan.
Sessions:
Teodor Heggelund
Macroexpand-Noj Speaker
Teodor has designed floating bridges, hotels and high-pressure containers with engineering, and built tools for engineers, journalists and knitters with software. He wants great tools and workflows for computation.
Sessions:
Kira Howe
Macroexpand-Deep Speaker
Kira's been writing software for the past decade with a focus on data-intensive web apps and a particular interest in Clojure programming and data visualization. She loves open source development, fostering communities online and in-person, and learning new things. When she's not at her desk, you can find Kira teaching yoga, playing violin, or running with her dog.
Sessions:
Jelena Losic
Macroexpand-Deep Speaker
I am Jelena, functional programming developer with 10 years of industry experience and mathematical educational background. I am curious about the networks and laws that are applicable in large scales, leading to better understanding of big data.
Ray McDermott
Macroexpand-Deep Speaker
Ray has decades of experience writing commercial software for databases, finance, manufacturing and cloud services. He is a Clojure enthusiast and advocate and produces and participates in several podcasts and YouTube channels. The impact of hyper-scaled LLMs is the subject of his most recent project. While not raging, he’s gardening, out on a bike or in the woods with a camera.
Sessions:
Žygimantas Medelis
Macroexpand-Deep Speaker
Author of Bosquet, Clojure user since its v1.0. I have been working with unstructured text data processing for over a decade - hence the topic of the talk.
Tanvi Nagar
Macroexpand-Noj Speaker • Macroexpand-Deep Speaker
Tanvi Nagar is a final year student at the University of Hong Kong, studying International Business and Global Management. She is passionate about mathematics, finance and their integration with technology - which is why she chose Information Systems and Analytics as her second major. Hoping to build a career in finance, she has solidified her technical and professional skills through roles in Financial Services Consulting, Corporate Banking and Wealth Management. Being a curious mind, she is always looking to broaden her horizons through learning about new things, travelling the world and plays badminton in her free time along with reading voraciously.
Stoica Ovidiu
Macroexpand-Deep Speaker
Ovidiu Stoica is a software developer with 10 years of experience, out of which the last 5 are in Clojure. He has been building voice AI agents for the last 1.5 years for enterprise clients and is the creator of simulflow - a voice AI agent clojure framework.
Timothy Pratley
Macroexpand-Noj Speaker
Timothy grew up exploring jungles, fighting kangaroos, surfing, and programming computers. After a career of leveraging computational graphs for companies he is now building Hummi.app, a diagramming app that puts the power of graphs in the hands of individuals.
Shantanu Sardesai
Macroexpand-Deep Speaker
Shantanu is a budding Clojure programmer and the newest member of the jank mentees team. With a background in mainstream languages like Kotlin and TypeScript, and a longstanding fascination with Clojure, compilers, and runtimes, he was naturally drawn to jank.
Ben Sless
Macroexpand-Noj Speaker
Software engineer, father of three, enthusiastic Clojurian
Sessions:
Ludger Solbach
Macroexpand-Noj Speaker • Macroexpand-Deep Speaker
Ludger Solbach is a software architect for 'msg for automotive' in Germany. He is the creator of Overarch, a lightweight system modeling and visualization tool and QClojure, a library for programming quantum computers. His favorite programming language by far is Clojure, a modern functional LISP. He uses it for his open source work, at work when feasible, and to create models for his 3D-Printer.
Peter Stromberg
Macroexpand-Deep Speaker
Peter Strömberg is a curious coder since 40+ years and is extra fascinated by making software that he uses do new things. These days he practically lives in VS Code and is making Clojure related extensions for it. Peter maintains Calva, Joyride, and Calva Backseat Driver. Backseat Driver is an AI extension for VS Code Copilot, giving the AI tools for using the Clojure REPL, as well as for structural editing.
Sessions:
Daniel Szmulewicz
Macroexpand-Noj Speaker
Functional programmer. Closet philosopher. Emacs meshugge.
Sessions:
Justin Tirrell
Macroexpand-Deep Speaker
I'm Justin, I'm a Clojure maximalist and independent software developer. I like working on trading systems and GUIs and rolling my own software tools and yak shaving.
Jan Wedekind
Macroexpand-Noj Speaker
Jan studied compiler construction and robotics and later did a PhD in computer vision. He currently works in industry developing inspection software. His first programming languages were Omikron Basic and later Borland Pascal. In industry he used C++, Ruby, and Python. In his spare time he got interested in Ruby, GNU Guile, and finally Clojure.
Christian Weilbach
Macroexpand-Deep Speaker
Christian Weilbach is a long-time Clojure developer working on distributed systems such as replikativ, Datahike, and supporting libraries. He has also worked with Clojure during his PhD on probabilistic programming, besides work on different simulators and inference systems in Julia, Python and C++. He has published many machine learning & AI related papers in top tier venues and is working on an organizational framework of life & intelligence (both in theory and implementation).
Edward Widjaja
Macroexpand-Noj Speaker • Macroexpand-Deep Speaker
Edward Widjaja is a final-year Data Science and Engineering student at the University of Hong Kong. He's always been interested in anything nerdy; from algorithms and trading systems to quirky side projects, he is now channeling that curiosity into finance. Currently taking a semester off to work at a bank, he's exploring how emerging technologies intersect with financial markets. His goal is to build a career that combines data-driven decision-making with practical financial solutions. In his spare time, Edward enjoys swimming, gaming, and chatting about anything from market trends to tech experiments, so feel free to reach out!
Luke Zeitlin
Macroexpand-Noj Speaker
I'm a programmer, musician and clojure enthusiast and former co-founder of Gybe, a water quality remote sensing startup. I'm interested in music, DSP, functional programming and plants.
Sessions:
Jianling Zhong
Macroexpand-Deep Speaker
Jianling is a software engineer with a focus on machine learning. He has always been intrigued by how compilers work. He has been hacking on jank, even though he had little experience with Clojure! The work of bringing torch to jank is right up his alley.
Organizers
Siyoung Byun
Organizer • Host • Macroexpand-Deep Speaker
Siyoung Byun is currently a freelance fullstack Clojure developer living in Seoul, South Korea. She studied Astrophysics for her undergrad in Canada, where she first got into programming and data analysis while running simulations of dying stars crashing into each other. Ever since she was introduced to Clojure at a previous employer in 2018, it quickly became her favorite programming language and her passion. Beyond software development and data analysis, she likes to hike, bike, knit, sew and snuggle with her cat in her free time.
Siavash Mohammady
Organizer • Macroexpand-Deep Speaker
Siavash is a Clojure developer with a knack for trying new things and crafting solutions through creative combinations of technology. He's worked on GIS software for agriculture, building a low-code BI tool powered by Clojure, LLMs, and rule engines to extract key reports for executives. These days, he's working on startcheck.xyz, an automatic pitch deck evaluation software.
Kapil Reddy
Host
I'm Kapil 👋, founder of Unravel.tech and former Head of Platform Engineering at Helpshift. I've been working with Clojure for the last 15 years, and I absolutely love the language. At Unravel.tech, we're building enterprise-grade Agentic Systems and bringing GenAI and LLM capabilities to life for our clients. Some recent projects include: 🤝 LLM-backed background agents that help you prepare quickly for sales calls. 🏛️ Building AI that follows regulations for a consumer finance advisory app—because compliance shouldn't be an afterthought. 💻 Automated migrations of large (MASSIVE) code-bases. The kind that makes devs lose sleep. I'm particularly passionate about prompt optimizations and evals—the unglamorous but crucial work that makes AI systems production-ready. In my free time, I'm building foundations to make Clojure LLM-friendly, because I believe the language deserves first-class support in the AI world. Whether you love or hate LLMs and GenAI, if you want to talk about it, come find me!
Daniel Slutsky
Organizer • Host • Macroexpand-Noj Speaker
Daniel Slutsky is a data scientist at Endor Global, part of a team of Clojurians building a wellness app using biometric data from wearable devices. His main focus in recent years has been the Scicloj group, where he is involved in community building and co-maintaining a few of the tools and libraries. His approach towards open-source communities is drawn from his past experiences in various activist groups.
Learn more about our sessions and the conferences.