I only started learning CL during last month advent of code, and it's incredible to know you can do so much with the language, thanks for the insights. As other have mentioned, you can count me in if you ever write a blog about the process
You're most welcome!
You'll want for nothing but the great thing about lisp, in my opinion, is that it's /so/ easy to create. A good article on this is The Lisp Curse[0], which argues that its power is a bad thing as it prevents communities from forming but as a developer, I want to use the best tools available. If that results in me, as a business owner, requiring less people then that's a win to me.
We use Postmodern for Postgres interaction. Have no complaints at all. You're able to use s-sql which is SQL statements as s-exps but can drop into just passing it strings if required.
Dexador is how we're doing web scraping (and requests should we need to). Top tier, no complaints. Exactly what you want from it. Plump and lquery are also used for parsing HTML
Jonathan is where I'll fight with most people in the CL community. It's the best JSON library. When I say fight, I mean it, I'll throw hands at anyone recommending cl-json or jsown.
Local-time is something we depend upon a lot. Great for timestamp manipulation.
cl-cron for scheduling. I like it well enough.
I'm also a big fan of Hunchentoot for the web requests. All static pages (currently all addressable webpages) are generated by Spinneret.
There's a few more libraries but they may be more niche or more specific to us.