Bruce Tate
From icanmakeitbetter.com
Bruce Tate is a mountain biker, climber, author, father of two from Austin, Texas. The CTO for icanmakeitbetter.com is using Elixir and Ruby to deliver fast, scalable applications. He is the author of Seven Languages in Seven Weeks, Programming Elixir, and 10 other books.
Blog: icanmakeitbetter.com
Methodology & Culture
The Climb
Languages can’t succeed in a vacuum. In 1999, Dave Thomas wrote the Pickaxe book, a text that played a critical role in the adoption and growth of the Ruby programming language. In 2014, he was seeing some of the same signs in a young programming language called Elixir. In 2014, Bruce Tate and José Valim were coming to grips with the fact that Elixir needed a web server and realizing José’s Dynamo server was not going to succeed. Neither had any idea what it would take to climb the mountain in front of them. This climb is a process that all open source communities must go through. In this talk, Bruce will tell those stories and others as we explore the Elixir story, not from the perspective from the core team but as members of the supporting community.
Methodology & Culture
The Pendulum
Throughout history, the needs of the consumer, hardware limitations, and the capabilities of languages have set a pendulum in motion. At one side, the pendulum dictates that user interfaces be glorified forms with simple request-response semantics. At other times, the pendulum swings to the opposite extreme, and user interfaces become rich and dynamic, but they leave the programmer to deal with increasingly high technical mountains. This pendulum dictates what compromises must be made at the user interface, but more interestingly, it determines how resources are consumed and allocated on the server, the language choices that impact each layer of an application, and the way we think of generic terms like "server" and "connection". This talk will focus on the movement of the pendulum. We'll look at what forces in the industry set the pendulum into motion at each point. Finally, we'll look at why Elixir is succeeding in the face of the most recent and dramatic pendulum swing to date.