My life is going to be a little bit stupid for a litte bit longer. I have two more events to speak at. Cursed Code and Øredev.

But I have four events to suggest for your consideration.

Øredev, Nov 5-7

Malmö, Sweden

I believe it is Sweden's largest developer conference with somewhere around 1200-1500 devs every year.

I will be speaking on hardware security. It is always a good time. It is the type of conference you ask your employer to cover. Lots of good stuff, many tracks, many topics. You'll be covered.

oredev.org

Cursed Code, Okt 31 - Nov 1

Göteborg, Sweden

The spookiest developer conference. There is a family day that is way cheaper for kids.

Interesting folk with interesting plans. I expect a good time. Second year, first time I can make it and I was invited to speak.

cursedcode.se

Code BEAM Europe, Nov 5-6

Berlin, Germany

And I love a Code BEAM. That's why I agreed to be on the program committee. Now I've helped line up a super interesting line-up and then I'm committed to speak at Øredev and will fully miss it.

These are always a good time. This year has a special twist. The first day has a Gleam track. To be fully transparent. The hope is to get the Gleam community to come for the Gleam and stay for the BEAM.

codebeameurope.com

Gleam Gathering, Feb 21

Bristol, UK

Peter Saxton is putting on the first Gleam conference. A single day event, I bet there will be social stuff around it though, for this popping community.

Limited to 100 tickets. I bet they sell out faster than Goatmire did.

If you find Gleam interesting, it is still early in the community lifecycle. You could get in on the ground floor and showing up in person certainly helps.

gleamgathering.com

Silly season and eventual consistency

I've been in a very silly season of my year and perhaps my life. Lots of conference speaking, organizing, working multiple projects. Juggling stupid numbers of things occasionally. I still have some conferences to speak at this year but I think we are simmering down somewhat.

This means locking in on client work again.

Fortunately I have clients to do work for. And this is how the silliness pays off.

I have enough Nerves work to do only that. Full time.

I also have some projects in conversation that are content creation, developer marketing, blogs and videos. And people seem to want my help organizing events potentially. We'll see.

It is immensely gratifying to have the type of work you were targeting show up at your door. And invariably when I ask how people found me it is something I did 6-9 months ago. Occasionally longer but not always. This year I had someone reach out about my ElixirConf talk from 2023 which feels like three lifetimes ago.

Doing all the marketing, community, open source .. stuff that I do does give me a lot of surface area for discovery. What I do becomes visible through that. And people find me. And you don't have to be the biggest name. One of my Nerves clients probably contacted me because I combined two factors, I knew Nerves and I was in Sweden. You can be in a different country and that will be a boon to prospective customers there.

Being on the Nerves core team and all that of course helps legitimize what I know and confers some baseline trust. But that's not what makes me visible. You can look at who is doing ML vision work in the Elixir space currently and if you've been paying attention I think the people that pop out are Vittoria Bitton, Alvise Susmel and Paulo Valente, in some order depending on where you found their work.

The path for this stuff is not straight the way I do it. It isn't a repeatable recipe "give talk, publish blog post, make video, release 1 unit of open source, mix in a podcast episode, add newslettering to taste, sell shirt". It is a creative and fairly organic process of sharing my attention and interests with my peers and surroundings. Find the ways in which you l ike showing up in the community, focus them around the parts you care most about and it increases your likelihood to be able to work with them.

There are of course no guarantees. And making an impression, catching someone's eye, communicating interesting ideas. All that stuff is skill you build with repetition, practice and intent.

Whether you are helping people with their code problems the way lostkobrakai does or something else. You can be bad at the thing you want to do. He has had a ton of practice and is really good and effective. You get there by trying. Ideally you also lean into something you have some affinity for to help you along.

Anyway. I'm very happy I have the fortune of spending all my time on types of client work I genuinely enjoy. As my silly season, that brings the attention of clients, starts to wind down it is time to put my nose to the grindstone and do the work for a while. Probably doesn't mean I'll be quiet. I don't know how to do that. But it does mean I'll build up material for another silly season because I bet there will be one.

If you have questions along these lines, feel free to email, Bluesky or Fediverse me. Happy to help people find angles into the community work.

Thank you for reading, I appreciate it.