Underjord.pre_hack/2 - Berlin, 13th October

Hosted by BitCrowd a Berlin-based Elixir consultancy. We will meet up at some reasonable Sunday morning time at Köpenicker Str. 126. We will do Nerves together, I'll bring hardware and projects to learn from, if you have things you want help with or want to try, bring em. We will hack until lunch, eat, hack until dinner time. Then transition into the Elixir Berlin meetup for the evening!

To help me run this thing I have a ridiculous crew that are all planned to join us:

• Frank Hunleth (Nerves Core team)
• Jon Carstens (Nerves Core team)
• Benjamin Milde aka. Lostkobrakai (everywhere)
• Cocoa Xu (evision, adbc, tflite_elixir)

We have some limits on how many we can be but can probably adapt. If you sign up quickly enough you can ensure I have your shirt size for the first run of Nerves t-shirts in many years.

Register here

And a special thank you

Since BitCrowd are nice enough to host us I asked if I should share any of their stuff or help in some way. They have a spicy survey with some nice prices, Raspberry Pis and an iPad. All questions are optional in case one or two aren't your jam. I think they took some swings with this one which I think made it a fair bit more interesting.

Planting yourself and growing with Elixir

The Elixir job market seems to be bouncing back a bit. I understand it to be quite competitive out there for developers, still. I recently put out a role in a limited space with constraints on geography for the role and received 16 qualified candidates in less than a week. Definitely a decent number of people looking. I don't think most developers want/should/can tackle Elixir in the way I have so I will try to stay away from my own bias and pick what I think can be more broadly helpful to get into Elixir and be able to stay in Elixir.

Committing. This is tricky and not mandatory but I think it can be helpful and clarifying. If you decide your a focusing on Elixir until circumstances truly force your hand to widen your search. Then that will improve your chances. If you go "well, Elixir, Rust or Go" you'll be pulled all across the tech scene and you will have a harder time building a cohesive understanding or network to achieve the goal. I understand if you can't just pick but I mention it because it does help.

Engaging. This comes in a variety of forms. There are people that are rarely visible in the community that are actively engaging with my newsletter or only in code on GitHub. There are people who's engagement in the community is enthusiastic and encouraging replies on socials. There are people who try RC-releases and give early bug reports. Any and every angle where you create a connection between yourself and this social community and the technical ecosystem are paths for good fortunes and progress. The idea of luck surface area comes into play. You can also think of it as a neurons. The more and stronger connections you have the more likely you, as a concept, are to fire/be relevant in someone else's interactions. This is the essentials of "networking" but it doesn't have to be about shaking hands.

Meeting people. This is not really about reach as much as quality and establishing trust. A physical in-person meeting is better than a Zoom meeting is better than a DM chat is better than a group chat is better than a public channel is better than nothing. The "Oh, I spoke to that person and they seemed reasonable" effect is very powerful. Meetups can be really good, conferences are great, assuming you actively talk to people. This is not something everyone is comfortable with for sure. A mild in-person interaction punches way harder than a similarly mild online interaction.

You don't have to make a podcast. You don't have to give talks. You don't have to make a new library. Being a consistently positive|productive|kind|competent|helpful presence in the community and ecosystem matters a bunch.

When hiring any candidate who you know by name, avatar and reputation from the community has an advantage heading into interviews. All the qualified candidate can do Elixir and Phoenix. The majority of candidates I've seen are not people I've run into before then. Not all of them have contributed in our shared space and that matters. It takes effort but it does let you float to the top more easily.

The annoying thing about putting effort into this stuff is that it can't really be cheated. It won't do much for you in the early days or in short bursts. It is consistent participation over years that compounds. Even low-key effort over many years will be noticeable. You'll be part of the fabric of what we all do together.

I hope that was more encouraging than bothersome. Let me know how you think about this.

You can reach me on the Fediverse where I'm @lawik@fosstodon.org or by responding to this email to lars@underjord.io.

Thank you for reading. I appreciate it.