Day One - Alchemy Sessions

The first day of Elixir Conf consisted of all-day workshops. I was excited to see that Sonny Scroggins, fellow Nashvillian and core Elixir/Phoenix contributor, was an instructor for one of them. While I was unabledid not go to the workshops that day I was able to go to a “practice workshop” at the local Elixir meetup. I would highly recommend you go to one of his workshops if the opportunity presents itself.They’re a great opportunity to learn Phoenix.

Day Two - Meeting the Makers

On Friday the talks began. People from as far as New Zealand in attended and I was pleased to see around ten people from Nashville! Chris McCord gave a great talk on the path Phoenix is taking and Jamie Winsor talked about putting elixir into production. But my favorite talk by far was the ending keynote by Jessica Kerr titled “Why Elixir Should Take Over the World.” Following that was an after party sponsored by HRToolbox.

Day Three - All Good Things Must Come To an End

José Valim kicked off the final day of the conference with aKeynote about the road to Elixir 1.2 (including some tidbits on what’s coming in 1.3.) My favorite talk from the day was “Composable Queries with Ecto” by Drew Olson. It shined a light on some the questions I had concerning Ecto. It illustrated two separate ways to compose sql queries in Elixir. The conference wrapped up with an interesting panel hosted by Elixir Fountain. If you’d like to hear it check it out on SoundCloud.

Wrap Up

I talked to a lot of people , and all of them were a pleasure to meet. Elixir Conf 2015 was the first conference I attended and it definitely set the bar high! There were several talks for newbies and more on more advanced topics. The ticket was definitely worth the price.