See you at Oredev 2025

The conference just unveiled their theme for the conference. "To Infinity And Beyond". Website is very astronaughty and with any likelihood you will see me all around the conference.

In transparency, I'm letting you know because I have a marketing exchange with Oredev. I wouldn't have the exchange if I didn't want to go to the conference though. So it is a straightforward endorsement for me.

I've been to the conference twice and I've really enjoyed it. Usually I end up hanging out with Fredrik from Kodsnack, the Developers podcasters and various other awesome folks. Check the tracks to see what you can expect. Talk to your company about paying your ticket, then go learn some stuff while having a great time :)

I'm at ElixirConf EU 2025

After finding my hotel in Krakow and finding my footing I stumbled across Erlang Ecosystem Foundation CISO Jonatan Männchen and we chatted up a storm. Josh Price of Alembic who is my constant casual conference comrade joined up with us and eventually we went for dinner with Peter Solnica and Peter Ullrich. A good day and evening all in all. 

Day after was the Igniting Nerves event that was graciously hosted by Software Mansion. We went, we hacked, people joined. Here is an example of an Igniter, and here are the tests. We have a bag of PRs and we have an understanding of some corners of Nerves that need some adaptation for Igniter to fit. Primarily the systems are very aggressive about building Buildroot and Linux if you try to run a task or test and we'd like the Pi Zero system to be able to configure it's own network interfaces for example. There is more work to do. The end goal would make Nerves project config composable on top of other mix projects. So you could create a Phoenix project and then run `mix igniter.install nerves` to get a Nerves project set up in your Phoenix app. I really hope we reach the point where the Phoenix generators are Igniter-based. For now, I can help Nerves move that direction :)

After the workshop we went out to eat and then to the venue hotel where we met more of the conference attendees and ended up chatting into the late evening.

I'm writing this in the back of the room while hearing the story of how the BBC uses Elixir for their stuff.

I've heard the AtomVM keynote where David and Matteusz announced the Popcorn project improving the Elixir support in AtomVM and improving heavily on the support for using AtomVM in the browser as WebAssembly. It is still early but very promising for running Elixir in the browser with a significant smaller footprint than the BEAM. It will also mean interactive examples in the browser, runnable documentation and more. Wild. AtomVM was already cool as covered on BEAM Radio.

I've seen Zach Daniel show off Ash AI which essentially shows how the fundamental abstractions built up over the years provide a powerful foundation for exposing new interfaces to emerging tech in a sane way. Whether you are bought in to agentic stuff or you simply want some natural language inputs into your system they've really built a good foundation for you. Ash continues to be some of the tech I really need to get proper work-time with. I've used it, but not enough.

James Arthur talked about dangling off of an elephants ass and then broke down the real challenges of local-first style applications and made a very good case for their electric tool and the fully integrated tooled up Phoenix Sync. Then he attempted a ridiculously audacious demo for conference wifi. The first one worked. The second one did not. Mostly. "Tequila!" as they say. Well worth a watch when talks come out.

Soon lunch on day 2. I'm having a fantastic conference. Thanks to everyone who comes up to chat. Thrilled to meet a lot of people I was acquainted with, thrilled to make new acquaintances. Just an absolutely lovely time.

Alright, I need a snack. You can reach me here on email, on the fediverse where I'm @lawik@hachyderm.io, on Bluesky or by responding to this email to lars@underjord.io.

Thank you for reading. I appreciate you.

The Elixir shirt is now shipping on-demand, you can just buy it at oswag.org. Our little shirt operation. Blessed by core teams everywhere.