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

Now shipping with stickers :)

All aFlutter

Among people that like and promote Elixir as part of their work-life and overall practice it is a meme that we mostly preach to the choir. That is. We focus on presentations at ElixirConf, CodeBEAM and try to impress our peers with how cool we are at using our own platform and how good it is at things. And this is fairly truthful. We tend to focus on this world where we are easily understood.

Speaking to people who understand what you are talking about well feels like progress. It is part of building up. It is the step beyond having the intro-level conversations and for a seasoned practitioner it is where the interesting bits are and where excitement happens.

This is not where you reach new people and grow the ecosystem's headcount.

I did a tiny part in reaching outside yesterday. I spoke at a Flutter meetup. I don't do a immense amounts of Flutter but I do use it weekly for a Nerves device at SmartRent (who are a client of mine). And I can speak coherently on how Flutter and Nerves fit together.

For the Gothenburg Flutter Meetup it is hard enough to find a speaker, even harder to find someone who has an unusual angle to share I imagine. It was a win for them and it was a win for my agenda of making the swedish westcoast insufferably BEAM-pilled.

If you are in technical communities that are not about Elixir but you can present about what you do with Elixir in harmony with the topic. That's a good move and people should do it. How does Elixir enable your React Native app to be more awesome? How do you use Elixir on Nix? How did you make a backgammon app in record time with LiveView? There are always stories to tell.

The big move is hitting larger conferences, finding bigger stages, finding the ultimate pitch that will immediately flip a whole room. That's a full-time job crossed with fickle fame and a lottery. Not everyone can do it, no-one should feel obligated. But presenting to your peers is a much smaller lift and is almost guaranteed to have a small amount of solid impact over time.

Where could you be spreading Elixir and is that something you'd want to do? Let me know 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 you.