ElixirConf 2018 Notes
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After attending ElixirConf I am as confident as ever that Elixir is a language, community and ecosystem I want to continue to personally invest and participate in.
About two years ago I made the decision that I needed to diversify my technical skills outside the Apple ecosystem. I then went on to experiment and research lots of different languages and frameworks, including EmberJS, Go, Rust, Elm, HTML5 updates, React and Elixir.
The Elixir interest started from a broad recommendation from Dave Thomas who I had years before followed heavily while doing Ruby on Rails development. Elixir also had gotten momentum from my interests in Functional Programming and looking to solve problems outside of traditional Object Oriented Programming design patterns. Over the last few months I’ve gotten deeper into Elixir and I really like what I’ve found.
I’ll do a post in the future about why I’m liking Elixir so much. It’s a potentially large topic and I want to give it the space it deservers.
ElixirConf was a great event. Two days of training and two days of conference sessions; I took it all in. My personal estimate would put the training day attendance at around 150 and the full conference at around 500.
While educational, I found the class pacing to be mixed. I felt one went a little too slow and the other a little too fast. There was a wide gamut of Elixir experience in the audience so I think it’s challenging for the instructors to find a pace everyone can agree with. That said, I learned a ton in each of the two more introduction-based classes I attended. I was envious of the more advanced classes that were covering GraphQL and hardware development using Nerves — I heard people were very impressed with them. Maybe next year.
For the conference days we had some great keynotes and session. I loved hearing José Valim (creator of Elixir) talk about the future of the language including the core teams failed experiments with adding a type system and why it’s not on the horizon. Chris McCord (creator of Phoenix) did a closing keynote, reviewing progress with the framework including a preview of Phoenix LiveView which was very impressive and has an opportunity to shake things up in the single-page app space. Aaron Renner had a great talk on taming complexity which mirrored some of my previous iOS code patters with way better naming. Aaron Votre’s excitement about GraphQL is contagious and I’m anxious to get my hands dirty. Andrew Bennett has some great tips in his Sustainable Testing talk. Daniel Azuma did a great job showing how we can mix and match Docker with traditional OTP deployments for unique benefits. Some time slots were competitive for my attention. I sadly missed Boyd Multerer’s Introduction of Scenic and Eric Oestrich’s Going Multi-Node session which both were well received from chat in the hallways. I’ll be sure to watch them on YouTube in the week ahead. In fact the majority of the conference keynotes and sessions are already posted on YouTube if you want to take a look.
Despite my general shyness, the community was very welcoming and friendly when I put myself out there. I had some great conversations during breaks and lunch. Hopefully these will continue on the community Slack and forums — I need to spend some more time with those.
Finally, everyone is hiring. Almost every speaker who represented a company said they were hiring. While I’m not looking for full time employment its relieving to see such hiring interest in a more niche language than say my current source of income, iOS.
Next year ElixirConf will be in Denver and assuming I find a way to keep Elixir active in my development schedule (I have a potential Elixir subcontract in the fall as well as some personal projects) I plan to be there.
For more on Elixir check out its homepage.
