Elixir Extravaganza – Carbon Five LA Talk Night June 15th 2016

Rudy Jahchan ·

Excitement continues to grow around the functional programming language Elixir and it’s web framework Phoenix. Many are intrigued by the pair’s ability to scale due to the Erlang VM while remaining maintainable and understandable thanks to their Ruby and Rails pedigree.

But is it production ready? Should you consider it for your next project? Basically, is it time to drink the Elixir? It’s a question we’ve answered before and we want to continue that conversation.

That’s why we’re inviting you to our next Talk Night, centering on the practical use and adoption of this exciting new language.

First up, from our San Francisco office, is our Director of Engineering Christian Nelson. He’ll talk about that crucial decision to investigate and possibly use a new stack like Elixir:

Is Phoenix better than Rails? What really matters when you’re evaluating new tech stacks? This talk will provide a peek into how we evaluate and introduce new technology at Carbon Five. It will give you some tools for evaluating new tech and help put what’s important into perspective.

Then developers Tommy Fisher and Alex Daniel, both also from SF, will present Diving into Phoenix, the Elixir based web application framework:

Getting started with new tools can be challenging. With a new language, paradigm, and framework to learn, this is especially true of Phoenix. We recently ported one of our internal applications from Rails to Phoenix. We’ll share the learning curve we, as Rails developers, faced, and why we think it was worth it.

Finally, Chattanooga based Elixir contributor Chris Keathley will talk about Concurrent Feature Tests with Wallaby:

Feature tests are one of the best ways to ensure reliability and consistency for web applications. But, as your test suite grows feature tests can become a performance bottleneck. This leads to people running their tests less often or only in CI. In some cases it means avoiding feature tests altogether. Luckily for us Elixir and Ecto 2.0 makes it easy to run concurrent browser tests. Wallaby is a tool designed to take full advantage of that. In this talk we’ll look at how to configure a Phoenix application for concurrent testing, give a brief overview of Wallaby, and showcase how we can use data transformation and composition to quickly build a highly concurrent test suite.

As always, our doors will open at 6pm, with pizza, drinks (including plenty of non-alcoholic options), and wifi provided. The talks will kick-off at 7pm, with Q&A interspersed throughout. We’ll all hangout after before closing out at 9pm.

So sign up on Meetup, bring your own questions and ideas, and then all take deep drink of Elixir!

Rudy Jahchan
Rudy Jahchan

Rudy’s fascination with computer programming began at age 10 when he mistakenly picked up the Micro-Adventure book Space Attack; he thought it was going to be about Star Wars. That happy accident led him to graduate from McGill University in Computer Science and start a 12 year career in software development playing with a wide range of technology; everything from web applications to cryptology to NoSQL.