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Hallway track

Code BEAM Europe in Berlin has been very good so far. Lots of good talks, many of which I've missed to catch up with people. My colleagues have been going to many of them though and I hear good things.

I am sitting a bit to the side of the conference typing this out right after Chris Grainger's keynote on how his company is using Elixir's new Machine Learning stack to simplify their end-to-end application by eliminating Python. A very Elixir story and it was a good listen. Much like LiveView can eliminate the need for JS frameworks for many UI needs and the BEAM usually obviates the need for a separate in-memory cache server, it seems Nx enables that for Machine Learning. And much like LiveView, which has a lot efficiencies built into it Nx brings things that the Python stack struggles to do. Batching, distributing work across nodes and GPUs.

Then José gave the updates on Elixir. It was a good small set of them. A documentation revamp which should be more approachable to both beginners and more useful to oldies like myself. Welcome error message improvements. Compile and start time optimizations.  Great stuff. Very little in terms of change and churn.

Yesterday was mostly about talking to all the nice folks. I've definitely had conversations about the concerning and very boring market. Startups are struggling to get new VC money, consultants and contractors are generally still employed but seem a bit mindful of the market situation. Mood overall has been good though and I've been thrilled to have so many fun exchanges.

We ended up pulling together a mesh of twenty or so people when we went for pizza after the event and we were just shooting the breeze for hours. Just a fantastic time, with old and new acquaintances, friends and peers. This is probably the most fun and lively Code BEAM I've been to.

I've even had a few exchanges that might be business opportunities both in terms of my consulting/contract work and my Elixir community efforts. Glad to also have prepped a couple of good prospective guests for BEAM Radio. I'll tease the prospect of having Ingela, who does the SSL in Erlang, from the Erlang / OTP team on the show. Also spoke to Hayleigh of Gleam Core team. I hope y'all are as curious about those conversations as I am.

One day in and I'm very glad to be at this conference. My colleagues and my community, such a good mess of people.

Are you attending? Are you watching remotely? If you never go to conferences, is there some particular reason aside from the cost? You can reply to this email or poke me on the fedi @lawik@fosstodon.org, I enjoy hearing your thoughts.

Thanks for reading. I appreciate your attention.