About Me

My Journey to Elixir

University

• Studied Computer Science for undergraduate and graudate school
  • Primarily worked with Java, C, C++
• Took a programming languages concepts course
  • Coded in Common Lisp, Haskell, and Prolog
  • Came to the conclusion that function programming was something I would never do
• Specialized in Computer Graphics for my Masters
• Wrote my Master’s thesis on ray tracing using parallel hardware
• Optimized ray tracing using CUDA via warp optimization
  • My first taste of parallel programming
    • Felt like I had super powers!

Early Career

• Got my first full time Software Engineering job in 2012
• Between 3 companies that I worked at I primarily used:
  • C#, Java, PHP, Python, Javascript
• Was not very happy developing in these languages/ecosystems
  • The runtime always felt limiting

Later Career

• Started looking for a language/ecosystem where concurrency/parallelism was a 1st class citizen
• Read Go in Action in 2015
  • The Go concurrency model left a bit to be desired
• Read Elixir in Action in 2015 and was hooked
• Got my first full time Elixir job in 2016
  • Been writing Elixir professionally ever since

Finding Happiness on the BEAM

• Since 2016 I have been happy working on and with the BEAM
• Open source library maintainer (PromEx, MJML EEx, Doctor, Unplug, OctoFetch)
• Open source contributor (Livebook, Phoenix, Broadway, Telemetry, Absinthe)
• Host on the BEAM Radio podcast
• Co-author of the Nerves Weather Station book
• Currently working on Elixir Patterns with Hugo Barauna
• This talk contains some of the recent work from Elixir Patterns!

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