Speaking
Unionization, AI, and You
Software engineers have for decades taken for granted that demand for our services will only go up, as will our salaries. We may not have had great job security in any one job, but there was always another one (and a pay raise) around the corner. In our current generative AI world, it is no longer safe to take that for granted.
In this talk, we’ll learn about unionization efforts across the tech industry. We’ll talk about the realities of unions, both the good and the bad. You’ll leave with an understanding of the various steps in forming a union, all the way from recognition to ratification and beyond. And, who knows, maybe you’ll get to negotiate a contract with an AI when it replaces the C-suite at your employer.
Refurbish Your Creaky Test Suite
It’s not just you. Many of us work with increasingly creaky test suites on a daily basis. Why do some tests fail intermittently? Can this test be async? Do I need to care about my test suite being async at all? Don’t just shrug your shoulders and tag it as flaky! Your test suite can be refurbished!
In this talk, you’ll learn how to improve your legacy test suite through the lens of an 8+ year old production test suite that has made just about every mistake you can think of. You’ll learn techniques for setting up realistic looking test data, managing shared state, and how to make your code more testable to begin with. You’ll leave with actionable steps you can take to refurbish your own test suite.
This was accepted to ElixirConf US 2025 as a backup talk, but they ended up not needing a backup. I’ve given it at the Ohio Elixir Meetup since then. It’s future is currently in limbo as I figure out if it needs retooled.
SPAs Without Javascript: Simplify Your Stack
Are you tired of writing JavaScript? Are you only using Node to avoid context shifting between languages? Good news! In recent years there has been an explosion in developer options for creating rich, real-time, browser-based apps with little-to-no JavaScript!
This session will give a brief overview of these options and dive deep into an app built with one of them. You’ll leave the session knowing the pros and cons of this new model vs. traditional JavaScript frameworks and a virtual pet who will provide you with unconditional love until you forget to feed it for too long.
Messaging With Limits: Concurrent, Multi-Stage Data Processing in the Real World
Our team at GetThru found ourselves with a scaling problem. Working with our existing infrastructure for sending text messages was becoming increasingly complex. Years of bewildering external requirements had led us to the point where the existing system was both incorrect and difficult to reason about.
In this session, we’ll go over a case study of our new concurrent, multi-stage data processing pipeline. Starting from the fundamentals, we’ll see how our team efficiently handled our existing external requirements and built in flexibility for the future. Finally, we’ll look at how we did all of this in our existing monolith, avoiding the complexity of microservices.
It’s a Live(View): Discover the Elixir of Life With a Virtual Pet
Are you tired of writing JavaScript? Are you only using Node to avoid context shifting between languages? Good news! In recent years there has been an explosion in developer options for creating rich, real-time browser-based apps with little to no JavaScript!
This session will give a brief overview of Elixir and then create a virtual pet app using Phoenix LiveView. You’ll leave the session knowing the pros and cons of this model vs. traditional JavaScript frameworks and a virtual pet who will provide you with unconditional love until you forget to feed it for too long.
Taming Personal Knowledge Management with Obsidian and Dataview
Obsidian allows you to take notes entirely in Markdown. Dataview lets you query metadata in those notes. Come learn how you can use them to track your life for fun and (no) profit!
- Demo Vault: GitHub
From Punch Cards to Git: A Brief History of Version Control
Believe it or not, there was a time before Git. Even longer ago, there was a time before version control. In this conference session, we will discuss version control systems of yesteryear, such as SCSS and RCS, file locking, versioning, the Darcs patch theory, the history of version control, different paradigms, and the future of version control.
NoVA CodeCamp 2020 (Virtual)
