The cramped 6.5-hour flight to Seattle was worth being uncomfortable for the remainder of the night as ElixirConf 2018 was a truly great event. I experienced two major firsts: speaking and the hallway track. Chris McCord dropped Phoenix.LiveView, Boyd Multerer released Scenic and I am already drinking the kool-aid.
I mention a few talks below but I wanted to point out there are many more. Please visit the ElixirConf Youtube Channel to view more.
Speaking
Due to my obsession interest with weather (particularly wind speed) I built a weather station using Elixir/Nerves/Phoenix. The blog posts were well received and after a lightning talk at Lonestar Elixir 2018, I felt a full talk to be warranted. I went ahead and submitted “Did you hear that wind?” for ElixirConf 2018 and it was accepted. Many stressful nights resulted in the talk you see below. It was very fun to present my project in person, and the questions/comments from those at the talk sparked more interest in taking my projects to the “next level”. If you attended my talk, thank you, I hope I inspired you as much as you inspired me!
In the coming months, I will be starting a new project that will allow any type of weather station to report readings to a centralized service. I want to use GraphQL for the API layer and include property testing for no other reason than I want to learn it. Instead of a part by part break down of the project I will be posted journal updates with links to pull requests. Derrick Reimer has taken this approach for Level Journal and I find it very enjoyable to read.
The hallway track
I’ve only attended a handful of conferences, ElixirConf being my first non-regional one. Across my podcast line-up the words “Hallway Track” are heard often, but I have never experienced it. This all changed at ElixirConf 2018 as I spent the majority of my time talking to as many people as I could. It was so much fun! Not only did I meet some people that I follow online, but I made a ton of new friends from around the world. Talking with so many people who are excited about Elixir only fuelled my own excitement. The hallway track was amazing :)
Phoenix.LiveView
Saying that I enjoy working with Javascript would be a downright lie! Projects like Elm give me a sense of hope for the future of front-end development, but time is short. Chris McCord went “full circle” and returned to his roots to create Phoenix.LiveView. It enables developers to add special tags to their presentation layer and have pages updated when the server changes them. Thunder Snow would benefit from this as the web application would update temperature and wind speeds without a page reload, as the weather station updates the data.
I do intend on learning Elm at some point but Phoenix.LiveView will certainly be useful sooner to me as I don’t have to learn a new language to use it.
Scenic
If the Elixir ecosystem wasn’t amazing enough, Scenic was released!
Imagine the dashboard type interface you could build using Elixir, Raspberry Pi 3, 7" touchscreen LCD. Connecting such a device to a weather station using Phoenix Channels would really let you geek out during a storm!
ElixirConf 2019
Jim Freeze announced that ElixirConf 2019 will be outside of Denver Colorado at a new hotel that is currently under construction. I will 100% be attending and if I can get all my ducks in a row, I’ll submit a talk. See you next year!
