Recap: September 6, 2016 Meetup

Thanks to all who came out for our first in-person meetup! And thanks especially to Lessonly for providing the space and to Expected Behavior for providing the pizza and drinks.

Scott Johnson kicked things off with a report from ElixirConf 2016, which just wrapped up last week. (Keep an eye on this page where the ElixirConf talks will be posted soon.) Scott was impressed with the level of maturity of many Elixir projects, though deployment can still be a challenge. And he noted how Phoenix is extremely powerful but still finding its place, moving away from “Rails for Elixir” and towards things like service discovery with Presence. Also, everyone was really nice.

Talks

Unfortunately, we weren’t able to record the talks this time, but you can find the resources online.

Steve Grossi gave the first talk, aimed at beginners, titled “Building and Sharing Your First Elixir Library”. View the slides here. And the artifacts:

David Kenyon gave a talk “Neural Networks Demystified,” an introduction to the concepts behind consciousness, AI programming in general, and artificial neural networks in particular. View the slides here.

We ran out of time before we could watch any of it, but David planned on showing parts of a talk by Karmen Blake walking through building a neural network in Elixir (with code examples). You can watch Blake’s talk on YouTube:

“Learn Elixir: Building a Neural Network from Scratch” by Karmen Blake at ElixirDaze 2016