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

Recap: Our First Virtual Meetup

We had a great first meetup over Google Hangouts on Air—thanks to all who participated!

Watch the entire recorded Meetup on Youtube.

Talks

Steve Grossi gave an Intro to Elixir and mentioned the following links for learning more:

Joel Meador talked about API authentication with Plug and incremental strategies for improving performance with agents and then ETS. He’s posted the repo here: bitbucket.org/janxious/plugginaway

In response to a question aboue APIs and testing, he provided the following links:

Announcing Indy Elixir!

Interested in building real-time apps, lightning-fast APIs, or connected devices on the internet-of-things? Join us as we explore Elixir, an exciting new functional programming language with an emphasis on concurrency, high-availability, and clarity.

We’re just getting started. Here’s what you can do now:

Explore Elixir

Prefer Video?

“Pragmatic” Dave Thomas introducing Elixir in 9 minutes, including building a concurrent map function
Chris McCord on how to use the Phoenix Framework’s “Presence” module to handle real-time discoverability of who/what’s online, even across multiple servers.
Jean-François Cloutier on using Elixir to build intelligent(ish) Lego Mindstorms robots.