I think everyone goes through this when they're newish to clojure - it's a recognized deficiency in the ecosystem, and one that needs to be solved sooner than l

I think everyone goes through this when they're newish to clojure - it's a recognized deficiency in the ecosystem, and one that needs to be solved sooner than later. However, I will say that once you "pick your poison" and get used to a specific workflow, it becomes vastly easier. The same set of tools work for pretty much any kind of project. Stuart Halloway gives a great talk[0] where he drunkenly expounds on the importance of REPL driven development and explains his workflow. Honestly, this changed the way I work day-to-day for the better and helped me realize the power that tools like Emacs and Cursive give you; specifically, in-editor evaluation of forms. For me, I use leiningen for building/dependencies and Emacs/CIDER for my editor. Another good choice is Cursive. Then split it up by what runtime I'm targetting: Clojure/JVM: - mount for state - ring for HTTP services - clj-http for HTTP requests ClojureScript/JS: - shadow-cljs for building (with lein integration) - mount for state - macchiato for HTTP services - cljs-http for HTTP requests - reagent for UI These tools & libraries cover about 80-90% of what I need in a new project, and everything after that is specific to the use case. Wading through one or two self-contained projects goes a long way into helping you figure out your workflow, and afterwards it's just applying it. My hope is that in the near future, a lot of the initial friction will be wicked away from the tooling and people will be able to get spun up much faster. Advanced Clojure workflow is a very different way of developing software than most people are used to, though. [0]: https://vimeo.com/223309989 https://vimeo.com/223309989