On the wind-whipped, rain-beaten shores of Sweden's west coast we took a stand. As the respite of summer fades back into the wet, cold misery and on into the snow-forlorn winter of this miserable coast we saw a moment. The summer crowds scattered. The sun not quite gone yet. And we seized it.

A gathering unlike anything the Elixir community had ever seen before. It was not the size. There have been many much bigger. It was not the legendary cast, although there were legends. Still we have seen more impressive line-ups. It was the people, the intent, the willingness to engage. A hopeful promise of something unusual was made. The people responded in kind. A pact was formed. A different event. And with that it became what it was.

We return to Varbergs Teater. We return again, a small event. Our hope is to once more offer an earnest promise to do something different. Our hope is to see you all again.

28th of Sep - 2nd of Oct. This year. Varberg, Sweden.

The legends were true. A second coming of goat. Those who dare speak will find our Call for Talks. It is open! Yet Welcoming! Onward!

Seriously though. We want speakers of all experience levels from all parts of the world. Take a look. The previous conference was a blast.

Ash Framework may well win

If you are in Elixir, especially in cloud services, backend or full stack and haven't gotten familiar with Ash I think you are missing out. If you are LLM:in your way towards glory and arguing that language doesn't matter anymore. Then you should probably look closer at Ash.

The framework has been around for a good while now in the ecosystem and has really built its presence through hard consistent effort. It is a serious and significant framework and it does most of the stuff people keep trying to push into Phoenix. It does the application layer. And it pushes it all the way out to the boundaries.

Phoenix is very stable and doesn't move much. If you want the forward-looking part of Elixir, slap Ash on top of Phoenix or if you are looking for the wildest bits, try Hologram.

The reason I think Ash is so wildly well positioned for the current climate of LLM-generated code is that it is a high level of abstraction. I think it is also potentially very helpful to new developers, though it is a lot to absorb. It is declarative and heavily structured. What you end up writing is the stuff you want your system to be and there is almost nothing else there.

The high level of abstraction, explicitness and expressiveness means less code to review for changes. Fictional things stand out like sore thumbs and also usually don't compile. Elixir is apparently already great for LLMs. Ash provides incredibly sturdy structure and lots of documentation to work from.

I'm pushing the boundaries of what I'm comfortable delegating to an LLM with an app for my own internal use. I've put some time in to build it out. It is for doing internal notes on sponsors, speaker travel and such for Goatmire. Stuff that needs more structure than it had last year. And it is all Ash, and I write very little code.

The access policy stuff is critical. Ash disallows by default. So it is bleeding obvious when the model adds "authorized?: false" to a call, big no-no, or when a policy is set to always allow. There is no indirection. Minimal complexity to grok. This is not a big app so my experience with Ash in big apps is limited but in big apps you usually end up trying to enforce this type of structure with norms and linters. So why not in the framework.

Ash also has all the escape hatches, you can write plenty of Elixir where need be. But the DSLs cover so much of the 80/20 stuff that every app needs.

And because the Ash-based app you build is compiled to a data structure you can build tools that do meta-programming off of the app's structure. You can generate code and UI.

I have no idea how much of the LLM stuff will pan out the way the hype folks think or want. But the models are quite capable now. And they benefit enormously from expressive environments. Also saves on tokens. I hope Ash thrives off of this moment. It has built the foundation for it well, for years. For humans. It just happens to suit machines.

Hat is off to Zach and the Ash team. I'm continuously impressed.

Thoughts or prayers? I'm here on email or on Bluesky and the Fediverse, easy to reach.

Thank you for reading. I appreciate you.