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.

raylib-jlt: 119 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. 42 shapes, 23 core, 16 in 3D, 10 games, 10 shaders, 9 generative, 5 text, 4 textures. 📖 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: 212 of the 217 official raylib examples, ported to jank: Clojure compiled to a real native binary through C++/LLVM. The shaders, textures, 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.

The same suite, a different Clojure. raygui-jnk is raygui-jlt's twin in jank, which compiles Clojure through C++ and LLVM rather than Chez Scheme. Same 24 examples, same names, same descriptions, so the two ports read as one library seen through two implementations. What differs sits underneath: jank reaches raygui as C++ rather than over an FFI, and the binding ships as an installable package. raygui was not available to jank before this, which is why the sibling b12n-raylib-jnk substituted keyboard controls in seventeen of its examples. Those can be real controls now, on one dependency line, with no vendored copy and no build script of your own. 📖 Docs & full gallery

bb tab-bar	bb color-picker-hsv	bb scroll-panel
bb gui-state	bb custom-input-box	bb spinner-value-box

Jolt hands raygui a Rectangle by value. jank cannot, because no native value crosses a jank function boundary at all, so the whole shape inverts. Every wrapper takes x y w h as plain numbers and builds its Rectangle inside its own body, never accepting or returning one, and application state lives in boxed cells allocated before the frame loop. A closure counts as a boundary too, so loop/recur does work that doseq cannot. 53 of raygui's 61 functions are bound that way; most of the rest are font and icon-file calls the six vendored .rgs themes make unnecessary, since each one carries its own embedded font. The six examples above are deliberately different ones from raygui-jlt's, so between the two sections all 7 groups show.

The same model, on native macOS. glitter-uikit keeps glitter's model exactly as it is and swaps the toolkit underneath it: one application-state atom, a pure state -> hiccup view, handlers as data, but every widget is a real AppKit NSView rather than a GTK one. It began as a port of glimmer-uikit, the AppKit renderer for glitter's Reagent-style sibling, so both models sit in the same code and the contrast is easy to read. 19 widget tags so far, with the same :hbox/:vbox sugar, and 7GUIs tasks 1 through 6 all ship. That is one further than glitter itself gets, so Circle Drawer had nothing to port from and its model is original here. 📖 Docs & guide

bb counter	bb widgets	bb todo
bb crud	bb flights	bb timer

The split earns its keep in the demos. set-temperature, parse-date and get-view-state come over from glitter untouched, because they are pure Clojure with no toolkit anywhere in them, so only the view and -main had to change. Styling is where the two renderers stop agreeing. AppKit has no CSS classes and no inline style property, so :class and :style are still accepted and diffed by glitter.core, then land here as honest no-ops. Circle Drawer asked for two things the renderer did not have yet. +[NSEvent mouseLocation] hands back a CGPoint by value and no scalar message send can carry a struct, so the FFI layer grew struct-by-value sends. NSStackView also lays children out in order with no way to place one freely, so the :canvas tag is an NSButton whose layer holds the circles. Those circles are CALayers rather than views, and a layer takes no part in hit-testing, which leaves a click free to reach the canvas under a circle and keeps hit-testing a pure function over the model.

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. The first piece of that is out: mcp-tkx builds Model Context Protocol clients and servers in Clojure and ClojureScript, across five protocol revisions, and one session can serve both the handshake era and the newer stateless one at once. Plenty of the rest is still private, so those patterns tend to surface in talks and articles before the code does.

Public bits: mcp-tkx (MCP clients and servers, five protocol revisions) · b12n-gamedev-course · raylib-jlt · b12n-raylib-jnk · b12n-raylib-clj · glitter (Replicant-style GTK4 for Jolt) · glitter-gl (OpenGL geometry and shaders for it) · glitter-uikit (the same model, on native macOS AppKit) · raygui-jlt (immediate-mode GUI for Jolt) · raygui-jnk (the same suite, for jank) · dartclojure.el (Dart/Flutter → ClojureDart, in Emacs) · viip · Clojars · RubyGems

I started jlt-commons in August 2026, a community-led home for Jolt libraries and tooling. Jolt is young, so most of its ecosystem is still one person's side project, and a side project stops the month its author gets busy. The org gives that work somewhere to land, and gives anyone who wants to help a place to do it that is not someone else's personal account.

There are two ways in. Adoption is for a project whose maintainer can no longer look after it. We ask the current owner first, every time, and prefer a transfer over a fork so the stars and the issue history come along. Incubation is for new work, whether that is a port of a Clojure library people already rely on or something the core team would rather not own. The bar is a real gap and someone willing to maintain it, which is deliberately low while the language is this young.

It is not an official Jolt project. The language and the libraries its core team maintains live in jolt-lang.

What is there so far:

• raylib-jlt, the 119 raylib examples above, and the first thing I moved across from my own account. Its docs moved with it, off my own hosting and onto the org's.
• raygui-jlt, the immediate-mode GUI suite, transferred the same day and onto the same docs setup.
• glitter, the GTK4 renderer above, with glitter-gl for OpenGL geometry and shaders and glitter-uikit for the same model on native macOS AppKit. All three went across together and publish at jlt-commons.github.io.
• docs-engine, the generator behind every project's documentation. A project writes markdown and a short config file, and gets syntax highlighting, mermaid diagrams and a theme that follows the reader's light or dark setting, without maintaining any of that itself.
• meta, the governance and the proposal queue, kept short enough that people will actually read it.

If you maintain something in Jolt and would rather it outlived your own free time, or you want to build something and would rather not do it alone, the proposal queue is open.

b12n-oss is where my own open source lands. It is a different thing from jlt-commons above, which is community-led and specific to Jolt. This one is just mine, and the name is a numeronym for burinchoomnuan: the first letter, the twelve in between, then the last, the same trick as i18n and k8s.

• mcp-tkx, a Clojure and ClojureScript library for building Model Context Protocol clients and servers. Five protocol revisions from 2024-11-05 through 2026-07-28, and a single session can serve both the handshake era and the stateless one, so a server does not have to pick a side while its clients catch up. The newest revision drops the handshake entirely and replaces server-initiated requests with multi round-trip results, which is a real shift if you already run a server. It is a fork of Metosin's mcp-toolkit, with the namespaces deliberately unchanged so it stays a drop-in. Runs on the JVM, on Node, and on Babashka. Docs, EPL-2.0.
• docs-engine, a fork of the jlt-commons generator, so projects in this org publish through the same setup rather than a second one built from scratch.

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 raylib-jlt, raygui-jlt, glitter and glitter-uikit, 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.}