A server crash during a Valentine's date became the turning point. The pursuit of technical complexity was costing more than just code - it was c

Doing Hard Things While Living Life: Why We Built Vade Studio in Clojure

submited by

Style Pass

2025-01-07 14:00:07

A server crash during a Valentine's date became the turning point. The pursuit of technical complexity was costing more than just code - it was costing life itself. This is a story of how three developers built an ambitious no-code platform using Clojure.

February 14th, 2019. I still remember that day vividly. My wife and I were finally on our first date night in months, watching a movie we'd been planning to see together. As busy professionals, these moments were rare and precious. Then my phone started buzzing.

Our server instance had gone down. None of the standard playbooks were working. Instead of enjoying a romantic evening, I found myself in the lobby, frantically trying to restore service while our system hemorrhaged data. That was the moment I realized something had to change.

I had spent years building systems in Python, Go, and JavaScript. Each new layer of complexity fed my developer ego. But as scale increased, things started breaking in ways that weren't just technical problems – they were life problems. I was becoming someone who sacrificed playfulness and joyfulness for the sake of being successful.