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Our crew is available for Elixir, Phoenix and Nerves. Do reach out if you have a need :) Just respond to the email or schedule a conversation.

We're all different

If I set aside the people that I vehemently disagree with. If I set aside the people supporting  various genocides, fascism and all the absolutely mountains of garbage heaping up in the world. If I just focus on the people I largely agree with, get along with or that are discretely neutral enough that I'm just mildly on my toes with them. I still get a peculiarly diverse crowd, in the details.

I'm thinking about my technical communities and that means primarily the Elixir community. And it is not incredibly diverse in the grand scheme of things. It is dominated by programmers who are overwhelmingly in a privileged position compared to a lot of other professions. It is dominated by white people and various europeans. Mainly men. There are massive swathes of humanity that are not seen or heard in the community. I'm not trying to claim it is diverse in that regard. But it is a sprawling, nuanced, human mess and in that way, quite diverse.

What plopped into my brain as I sat down to write this was rather the many weird and wonderful brains people have. The things they care about and what they focus on. I've met people who seemed completely disconnected until you touch a particular topic and they become a live flow of electric current. Engaged, switched on and excited. I see people that can engage with almost any part of the ecosystem. I've seen a table of four very senior Elixir devs agonize in perfect union about the pain of building complex forms and how that interacts with changesets.

Some people only care about distributed systems.

Some only about embedded systems.

Some want the grand utopian future of AI.

Some want to perfect the handcrafting of code.

Some are just excited about everything.

And the variety of skillsets is hilarious. I just recently had a good friend agonize over the title and blurb for a talk, they were clearly stressed about it. We talked about the topic. I offered to write something up for them. And they then insisted on producing weird and intricate C code for me in return, code I did need, as I had apparently lifted a heavy burden. What is a throwaway, easy activity for me, is someone else's heavy lift. What is near-impossible to me is five minutes for someone else. It is incredibly strange.

It is frustrating to run into someone and not manage to get a satisfying interaction. It is frustrating when other people don't get the thing you are excited about. It is frustrating when someone is neuro-spicy in a way that interacts poorly with your own spice-blend. Can't all people just compatible?

Of course not. That's where the awesome parts are when someone gets you. When you get to share a high-bandwidth conversation about your thing. Or you get to learn about a new thing in a moment when you are open to it.

It is nothing short of miraculous that these spaces work at all. And it requires people tolerating the imperfections, weirdnesses and various capabilities of the other people.

Seeing the inside of how much of "community" happens. Building the events, contributing to the projects, maintaining and supporting the projects, being on the board of the foundation is a recent one. As I engage more I keep needing to realize that I will meet these people over and over again and my understanding will get more nuanced with time. My snap estimates of people never hold up. We build our shared code, shared understanding, we work on our shared ideas in a very messy and nuanced throng of people.

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.