Goatmire Elixir is the world's coziest Elixir conference currently running.

Following on the legendary feel of The Big Elixir, EMPEX and Gig City Elixir. While we wait for those to return we assemble the community in Varberg, Sweden. Attendees from prior years generated some lovely statistics. We got responses from 81 out of about 150 attendees, these stats do not include speakers or staff.

While it may be hard to beat those numbers. Especially on novelty we wanted to expand the conference but not in the typical way.

We are opening up more tickets to allow more people to attend. But certainly not enough to require a soulless conference venue. We are still at the historical cozy theater. We'll go from 200 total people to a max of 325. We sold out last year and we hope to do so again. Tickets are still available.

More importantly we are adding free community workshops. These are not paid trainings. This is a labor of love type situation where we get together and hack on things, where beginners can learn the ins and outs of the language from passionate teachers. Where you get to put your hands on hardware, learn from people pushing the boundaries of the craft and where you can connect with people before the conference even begins. Workshop registration is free and does not require a conference ticket. We want more people to fall into this community.

Hope you'll join us :)

The things I talk about

At this point I've given a decent amount of conference talks. I've never repeated one that I can recall. I've tried a conference talk at a meetup in the weeks leading up to a conference. To be clear. I don't recommend not reusing talks if you speak a lot. But I'd get very bored so I don't. I think there is a bit of throughline of topics I come back to and something around presentational style, hopefully flair and demos. I want to look back on what I've done, throughlines and variation. If this has a purpose beyond my own reflecting I hope it might encourage others to put themselves out there with writing, videos or talks. It all helps.

I had started with blogging in 2019 and eventually videos, first of which was in 2021. Though production got real in 2022. That's all on the Underjord YouTube channel. Honorary mention to a remote event that I spoke at before any physical ones ElixirConf Africa in 2022.

My speaking journey as I think of it with physical events begins with:

ElixirConf EU in Lisbon, 2023. So I've been speaking for 3 years at this point

This talk is a live demo of Membrane, LiveView and Nx. Everything I'm talking about goes through the Whisper speech to text model. Certain pre-set words can move my slides forward. The only nerves in this one are the ones you can clearly here taking over my poor voice. I had prepared hard for this and I'm glad. Because it was nerve-wracking and the adrenaline was real. I'm happy with how it came out. 

Conceptually, the entire talk is a demo of the tech I'm covering in the talk. Most of the words in the talk are about creativity, abstractions and managing complexity. It also tries to embody that creativity in the presentation as a tool.

I memorized the entire damn thing as well which was.. oof.

Less happy with the recording quality. But overall a decent start and I think this is the talk most people have spoken to me about over the years. Partially I believe because people used to watch conference talks more closely back then.

Code BEAM Europe, 2023, Berlin.

This was not a proper talk. I roped José and Sasa into a live podcast interview dealio. I think it came out pretty good but the audience is not all Elixir folks so I can see why it might not have landed fully. I also wouldn't put interviewer first in my skillset. I enjoyed it though and feedback was mostly good.

Öredev 2023, in Malmö, Sweden.

I had not been to this conference before. It is a general developer conference. Sweden's second largest I believe. About 1500 people. Somehow this video got picked up and hit more than 20.000 times. Curious how we swung that. Trying to summarize the powers I see in Elixir for a broader audience is a recurring theme, not so much in my talks but as I end up talking about Elixir in new spaces. This was a big swing on that. I tried to go relatively spicy to make sure people were awake from the start. There is at least one decent demo in there.

NervesConf US 2024, in Chattanooga, Tennessee (US).

First overseas conference was GigCity Elixir where I was invited to do a keynote *gasp*

My first talk there was not a keynote though. It was a NervesConf talk. I was incredibly excited to get to meet the Nerves community and really go deeper on a bunch of Nerves stuff. I had my first Nerves client in Sweden and I was going ever deeper into the project after years of occasional hobby use and publishing the Nerves Newsletter. And I'd recently gotten a contract working with SmartRent as well.

This established a new theme. Embedded with Nerves and often with a security slant. This talk was a new odd thing for me because there were no demos. This tried to live entirely on the strength of my writing and storytelling. It ties together a twirled winding string of various topics and rabbit-holes I fell down along the way as we were building up a security story for a particular set of devices. I think it does a good job of embodying the weird fractal of journeys you go on with any involved technical project. It is also full of small in-jokes, references and hopefully most listeners could find stuff to enjoy in there and I think it is actually quite dense with information. Much of it useful.

One reason it was more story than tech demo is the constraints of time. I had two talks to prepare.

Gig City Elixir 2024, in Chattanooga, Tennessee (US).

I had such a good time getting to visit with the Bruce & Maggie, aka. The Tates. I'm so thankful they invited me to speak. I think I did pretty well delivering a type of call-to-action idea of what could be next in Elixir's pragmatic quiet revolution.

I don't recall hearing people reference this talk so not sure it has had a lot of reverberations. But then again it is not as memorable as a voice-driven demo. I think I'm still pretty pleased with how it was written and structured.

Code BEAM Europe 2024, Berlin

This one I really like. A lot of things came together for it. The only thing that wasn't great was that I stepped on the margin going over time. Thankfully Sasa Juric was after me, he is a good sport and talks plenty fast. So it worked out. But I didn't like that feeling and I don't believe I've done it since. I'm sure I'll goof again but now I know how awkward that gets.

This was the first talk I went in representing the Nerves core team and it felt nice to not just be showing off my stuff or showing what I can do with the ecosystem but actually showcasing cool stuff others did in our shared project. What is covered in the talk is recent changes in Nerves, cool updates in NervesHub and also just refreshing people about what Nerves does.

It is ~4 demos, one which failed and was pretty much saved by Jon Carstens photographing a credential from my screen, connecting his laptop to hack me and making the whole situation quite amusing.

In preparation I had 200 devices from the community connected. Which was awesome to see. Lots of people just stepping in, grabbing my firmware and bringing up a whole fleet for me to play with and demo.

And this established a new variant of slides that I've done variants of since. All my slides were video which means the scripting of the talk needs to be relatively tight. Feedback was great on that scheme. People seemed to enjoy it a lot.

Öredev 2024, Malmö, Sweden

I gave a Nerves talk at Öredev. Hardware demos and stuff. This was on their DevOps and tooling track and I tried to show off the ways we ship our firmware and how we make it serious and secure. Nerves, NervesHub and more. A chunk of demos. Dense information. I think it was a solid entry.

2024 was a wild year.

Code BEAM Stockholm Lite 2025, Stockholm, Sweden

This was an overview of NervesHub and how it works, what it uses. I barely remember it. 20 min talk. Unlikely to be my best work since it didn't stick in my mind.

Code BEAM America 2025, San Francisco, California (US)

I stepped in to cover with about two weeks of notice. I had offered to be in reserve and the organizers took me up on it. I was going to the event anyway.

This builds on my lively membrane talk from the first time I gave a talk so that's fun. It adds more layers, more models. It is way more technically focused. Showing a VAD and how it improves speech to text. I also introduced the thought technology that an LLM is a text-to-text filter. And I spoke to a very bad LLM running on my laptop.

I like the crunchy techy talks like this. Just showing people what they could be doing.

Really enjoyed San Francisco when I got away from the hotel I was at for a few excursions. Need more time in the town in the future. Not currently but hopefully some day.

Goatmire Elixir 2025, Varberg Sweden

I spoke at my own conference. In fairness I'm pretty well known in the community and I wanted a recognizable line-up. I wasn't sure anyone would be coming.

Also it helped me do an interesting integration with one of the sponsors. This talk is a very crunchy topic about how many Nerves devices we can run on a single Ampere One. About 5000 apparently.

It wasn't the best prepared and I threw out my slides after seeing Sam Aaron's more ad-hoc approach to slides. Overall I think it worked out but it wasn't my best work. It was a side-show to pulling off the entire conference. I was MC:ing the whole event. It is a wonder I had a voice.

What I love-love-love about these recordings is that you can hear audience reactions. Would have been good if we could boost just the speaker voice and we'll be exploring that for the next one.

Öredev 2025, Malmö, Sweden
 

Nerves. Security.

I revisited the video slides which turned out really well. One major demo showing some actual hardware security in action. I think I did a good job breaking down the bigger picture.

I also desoldered a capacitor in the slides :)

I'm impressed I pulled off a talk that I'm this happy with after Goatmire.

I hope you'll excuse the self-indulgence and maybe you found a talk of mine you hadn't seen before that fit something you are interested in. It was a nice review for me to see what I've done, what aspects I've revisited and so on. I can't believe it has only been 3 years. It feels like a long time. That is a pretty good takeaway. You can make things move fast with a decent combo of persistence, luck and leaning on the skills you have and putting effort into making things interesting you can .. get accepted to conferences so you spend all your time preparing for talks.

I suppose that's a goal you can have.

Thanks for skimming, appreciate you.