Conference is progressing well, waiting to hear from some funding sources locally before I can pin down ticket pricing. Also need to confirm a number of sponsors. But the wait-list seems like a pretty solid start. Seems unlikely that I'll be all alone in September.

Shirts have been moving as well. Well, The Nerves Shirts that are already in production have been moving. The Elixir shirts are mostly shaping up to be a nice pile to produce and ship there in early March.

Oh, fun thing. I just installed one of the SmartRent thermostats I work on with them as a replacement for one of the ones in my house. I now run Nerves and Elixir in my house. Feels oddly satisfying.

Oh, and Underjord has some capacity coming up at the start of the year. Schedule a call or reply here if you have a need.

Goatmire Elixir + NervesConf EU

10-12 September - Varberg, Sweden

New year and new possibilities. Want more Elixir in your life? If you can get your life to Sweden I can help.

I joke. To be honest I think there are things missing in Elixir events. Especially in Europe. I will try a small, focused, weirder event.

I love in-person events. I adore meeting the people I build and collaborate with. It is an opportunity to thank people, exchange hugs, put faces to names. A massive way of going deeper down the rabbit-hole. It never ceases to amaze me how much ineffable good I get from meeting people in the community.

If you've been wanting to engage with Elixir and this is geographically sane for you. This is a good chance.

Join the wait-list and get notified about tickets, CFP and all that good stuff :)

And more at goatmire.com

The only official Elixir and Nerves swag is available for pre-order/order at oswag.org.

I just ordered the stickers for packing in the Elixir orders as we approach production.

The real value is never quick

I love a quick hit to the reward system. But the stuff that truly raises the bar on how I feel always takes time. I remember the first time I went to a climbing gym and how fun it was. Also very difficult. If I think closer I also remember how my body felt after a year of climbing. I had much more power I could apply in the most pedestrian tasks. There was a deep satisfaction to being in good working order. This is not some mindfulness-flavored brag. I was never a superb climber and I'm no longer in any kind of good shape.

Everything takes time to make good.

Sometimes you can take a small leap. Usually from really bad to a better foundation. Most of the good is built up with many, many small improvements though. I see this a ton with Nerves and it is part of what makes Nerves harder to pitch than say, Phoenix.

Phoenix can be pitched as a quick hit and quick reward. Boom. Twitter clone in 15 minutes or whatever. And I've done some silly-fast hacks in Phoenix. It is definitely capable of getting something going fast. A good Phoenix app is quite different though. Phoenix is also perfectly capable there but the path is much less clear, much debated and any complex app simply takes care to shepherd through development in a continuously good state. Ash Framework takes one stab in giving you more structure there and it is non-trivial. Ash has some very stable ideas but there is a lot to learn to apply it.

When we build web services we pretend the hardware doesn't exist. Number goes up, performance goes up. We don't use anything specific or particular. An IoT device is the polar opposite. It is all about integrating the hardware and the software well. Making use of specific hardware features to provide some joy to the user, usually via the software. I've been working with SmartRent on their recent touch screen thermostat. It has a backlight and an ambient light sensor. The light sensor is consulted to decide how bright the backlight should be. Under what circumstances should the screen dim? Should it enter night mode based on time of day, light or some other factor? How differently do we want to drive the backlight if the user select dark mode?

This is just the user-facing part. Making a good device means making a device that won't break very easily. Nerves has a lot of those lessons in it. It is hard to make a snappy video for making a device operate well for 10 years. Good device plumbing like safe updates with A/B partitions, watchdog timers and self-recovery. Careful default behaviors because it is guaranteed that your clock will be out of sync at times. It is guaranteed that people will power-cycle the device brutally. A lot has gone into the fundamentals of Nerves.

If you ask anyone who has developed a device with Nerves they will also be able to tell you about how much more work they did on top to get a device that behaved well. How much it takes to polish that multi-faceted interaction between people, environment, hardware and software. Add some web services, apps and other integrations like radio and you've got a lot to tie together.

This is of course fun and can be quite satisfying over time. There are small hits of satisfaction to find all over the place but the big thing is how it comes together. Over time. The deeper satisfaction comes after significant time, continuous effort and a thousand small improvements.

Do you deal well with long-distance or are your more of a sprinter? 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.