This year Yair, Dan, and Eric went down to New Orleans for the Big Elixir; here are a few of our favorite presentations and highlights from the conference.

Eric’s keynote: All Aboard the Stateful Train

Eric gave a keynote this year! He offered examples of apps with varying levels of statefulness, talked about why you might want to go stateful, and covered some of the large concerns you’ll need to consider if you want to bring more state into your Elixir apps.

We liked seeing what you could do to make your Kubernetes life easier with operators. We hope we’ll get to apply some of what we learned in this talk someday! You can see his TodoOperator Elixir and YAML source on GitHub or check out his slides on SpeakerDeck.

Sophie covered real-time features with LiveView, PubSub, presence and channels; we enjoyed her many dog photos, clear explanations of core concepts, and hearing about new things like JS Hooks.

When you *think* you're re-doing a conference talk you already gave but you end up changing the whole thing bc @elixirphoenix #liveview has already changed so much in ~2months. @thebigelixir here I come! oh also expect this slide deck to include a normal amount of pics of my dog. pic.twitter.com/RGPY9avWbM — Sophie DeBenedetto (@sm_debenedetto) November 4, 2019

We enjoyed Ben’s talk because to some extent we’ve gone through much of the same journey for leex and yecc, and Eric gets an odd enjoyment out of BNF rules.

He’s got a web page version of his presentation up on his blog.

Other Favorites

Thanks to Brian Cardarella for the shoutout in his keynote; apparently his topic idea came out of the Lonestar Lunchisode we recorded earlier this year! We loved Todd Resudek’s talk on Mix and Hex, he was both funny and informative, as always; check out either of the episodes we’ve recorded with him if you’re not already familiar. Our favorite hallway-track conversation was with Emily Ashley on representing time in code; check out her presentation on 7 Falsehoods Programmers Believe about Place & Time from Clojure SYNC 2018 for more on that topic.

We also had a great time at the social events after-hours; congrats to all the organizers, speakers, and sponsors for another great Elixir event. Keep an ear out for the next season of our podcast coming soon, and we hope to see many of you at Lonestar Elixir in February.

Update: Edited 2019-12-06 to add links to videos; see the whole playlist of videos from the Big Elixir on YouTube.