Introducing Elixir at DDD12
One of the best ways to learn something new is to teach it. Yesterday I presented an introduction to Elixir at DDD12 at the Microsoft campus in Reading. It was a great day and lots of fun.
Thanks to @PocketPilot for the Microsoft building photo above.
DDD12 is a free community run event where talks are voted on by the community rather than going through the usual CFP process. Luckily my talk was voted for and I was up first. Thank you to everyone that voted for my session! Here's the abstract for the talk:
Elixir is a new functional language built on the Erlang VM. We’ll tour the Elixir language and it’s most important frameworks to discover what makes Elixir a great choice for building systems at ZOMG scale and how those systems stay up for so long with Wolverine level self-healing.
Elixir’s secret is in its Erlang heritage. When was the last time your telephone network went down? Never, right? That’s because most of the telephone network is written in Erlang. How does WhatsApp manage to support 1.2 billion users and deliver 42 billion messages a day with only around 50 engineers? Yes, Erlang.
Elixir takes the power and stability offered by Erlang and makes it more approachable, with a Ruby inspired syntax, simpler abstractions and some powerful tools which will enable you to build concurrent, fault-tolerant and distributed systems. We'll find out how this functional language is the most Object Oriented of all languages and how micro-service architecture is built right in.
Challenge yourself to break out of your comfort zone and look at how other languages solve problems. You’ll become a better developer if you do.
Unfortunately the sessions weren't recorded, but here are my slides. If you came to my talk, firstly thank you, but also please let me know what you thought. I'm always looking to improve and the best way is to listen to feedback.
Special thanks to @IJohnson_TNF for these epic sketch notes about my talk:
Thanks to everyone that helped on the day, it was very well organised and seemed to run without a hitch. As a speaker I was well looked after and would recommend this event to others that are interested in doing some public speaking. I enjoyed the other sessions too and all-in-all the quality of the sessions was very high. Thanks again, hope to see you all again soon.