ElixirDaze 2018 - Keynote by Rob Conery

[Music] thank you for coming thank you so much I want to thank think Johnny especially for inviting me this is so much fun I have to tell you I was talking to one of the speakers last night and I was saying that I typically go to big enterprise conferences and the fact or the the opportunity to come to a smaller one especially based on a lick sir which is my favorite language it kind of makes me it makes me really excited I'm really happy to be here and thanks to Johnny for that but I did have one condition before I came the one condition was that I could tell a really bad joke to start everything off because that's what I like to do and Johnny's like sure go ahead do what you want what's it gonna be and he's like well I don't know give me an idea and he said well how about something with the Olympics something like curling curling is on all the time you know you turn on the Olympics and it's always curling and I was like that's a good idea and he's like what is I don't even know what curling it isn't like dude what kind of programmer are you come on nine o'clock on Wednesday geez no but seriously Johnny was like you know I that's a dumb joke please don't tell that and I said no too bad too bad he's like no seriously what is what is curling is it like you know is it like shuffle Park I'm like dude seriously curling is like from Scotland 1600 don't you know what curling is okay come on that was I just the last bad joke I have I promise okay for those of you don't know me or what I do I have been doing a lick sir for the last I want to say you're gonna have two years and I am all-in on this language and I remember the first time I ever played around with it it was my with my friend Rob Sullivan I was about a year and a half two years ago and I saw a tweet of his where it said Phoenix and elixir went 1.0 fire up your text editors and I was like what is this language what's it all about this looks like fun and next thing I know it is three hours later we're pear coding and I'm writing queries and I'm freaking out this is one of the coolest languages I've ever used and that led me to just doing other things like experimenting with data access and what you could do with it so I have a little pin source project called Mobius I wrote a little book about all my explorations called take off with a lick sir I uh Turley love this language the only problem I have is that I was never able to do anything with it anything of substance and as I mentioned I go to these big enterprise conferences usually microsoft.net based kind of things and I usually get tag-teamed by friends of mine that work at Microsoft I won't mention their names but Dean Edwards and David Fowler from the asp.net team they sit on either side of me like so Rob tell me about elixir how's your cute little toy language and so you know I'll answer questions they you know they're good friends of mine they like to rib me and also they're but aside from that Damien always asked me the same question so tell me what you've done just tell me what you've done why should I care about a lick sir and of course my head's exploding thinking about beam and Erlang and all these things I'm like oh my god really he's like yeah yeah I know about Erlang and I know about beam but why do I care about a lick sir specifically that is a damn good question so I started thinking about that and I'm like well I kind of got stumped a little bit I mean other than it's cool syntax and you know fie other things the community is really vibrant blah blah blah and he looks at me he goes tell me what you've done with it what if what what client needs have you met with a lick sir wow that's a good question so we talk about stuff and I thought you know what it's time that I switch gears because I do a lot of writing I do a lot of video stuff I still do contracts but I haven't done anything in elixir I'm like it's time that I do that and switch into contracting for elixir so I told my friends on slack and they were really supportive telling me how well I done inside of a modern dev team which kind of messed me up a little bit I was like no actually I handled it really well that was again my friend Rob Sullivan who did not prick my ego at all with his little comment about me being on a modern development team I was like dude come on it's not been that long and then I thought about it and like geez you know I contract a lot still to this day but I have not been on a development team since 2009 and that was back when I worked at Microsoft and before that I had that's all I did I worked on huge part huge enterprise kinds of things that Microsoft is CTO of two companies just blah blah blah blah blah you know I hit that's all I did but I haven't done anything recently and I wanted to do something with a lick sir so coincidentally after all this happened I got a call from someone I've known for years who is now doing a start-up and he's he's doing an Internet of Things kind of deal and he called me up and he said hey you know firebase right you know serverless familiar with it played around with it and he says well this is what I'm doing could you help me out and he's like yeah I think I can but then as I'm thinking about it I'm thinking hmm as he's describing what he's doing I'm thinking this could be a perfect perfect thing for Phoenix and elixir and I got really excited and as I was doing this slide I should explain this as I was doing this slide my daughter walked in and she's like what is that she like the bird and I said it's it's Phoenix and she thought I said Nick that's totally going in the slide it just has to be in there so anyway I'm telling my client all about this and he's listening and I said well you know you have high input you you need to do I could a distributed thing and it's Internet of Things so it could really crush your servers if you're not careful so I'm thinking this is a perfect fit we could you could use a lick sir we could use Phoenix we could use ecto maybe I like ecto no you don't just kidding and so as as we're talking about this he's getting interested and he's listening more and I'm talking more and he's listening more and finally he just asks me this question I love this question are you sure you sure about this Robin you know I'm thinking wow you know like you can go off on stuff with your excitement you can you can you can tell people just how great elixir is but when they say are you sure they're saying I've got a business there's money on the line here and I'm putting everything on your opinion and I'm sitting there going whoa when it took me about a second or so to think about it and like yep yeah elixir will work it licks it will work if my dotnet friends were here right now they would probably be sitting there saying you're such an elixir fanboy I mean anything to you is just gonna be a lick surg and that to me is like oh boy here we go again you know having that discussion again where elixir is just a fad you know people just think it's the latest greatest fun thing and they'll do anything despite logic and reason to use it that's fairly accurate so this quote though this quote house this quote make you guys feel I mean you've seen this before right this is straight off of hz' elixirs just a fad you know and I've had these discussions online so many times and they're a graffiti but the thing I want to kind of get across is we need to let that go as a community because that's what we're gonna face with a new thing like a lick sir and it's funny that it's new but it's also old because of what underlies it and the common response that I would hear from friends whenever I tell them about these discussions is haters gonna hate right haters gonna hate and I want to challenge you on this all of us here I want to challenge you on this I want to tell you right now that's that reaction when someone tells you that elixirs a fatty like he was gonna hate that sucks because it stops the conversation what happens is it divides people right in half where you're not talking you're not reasoning anymore you're dividing yourself and dividing the room and you're saying it's a fad well you know you're a hater and then where do we get from that what do we get from that we get nothing we get no discussion you know back and forth so let's take this back to my client my client says are you sure I can't just sit there and rely on my belief I can't rely on my inspiration like totally man it has to be based on something reasonable that I can then tell the client yes for these reasons I think elixir is gonna be good for you in your business I don't think we should shift perspective on this that instead of haters gonna hate how about we say peers are gonna test what your idea is that's what we do that's we're supposed to do if we look at this as computer science which it is we should be able to hear critiques we should be able to hear people say why is that cute little language of you are something I'm interested in and we should be able to give them answers instead of just putting up the veil and saying haters gonna hate speaking of this is David hire Hanson a quote from him that drove me crazy when I first read it he's talking about a lick sir and he's bastardizing a quote from Martin Fowler which is don't distribute your objects but this quote here is first rule of distributed computing is don't do just distributed computing and you can read this quote in it's so inflammatory but that's what DHH does but I hate to say it he's also right but what is he right about is he right about don't do distributed computing or is he saying something else see if I was to run up the flag like haters gonna hate or DHH is gonna be a dick which both are true then it's easy for me to just put the blinders on and not nobody's talking about what he's saying is if we put on our business person's hats can we justify using a liquor or anything distributed from the get-go for a green field project no you really can't there's nothing you can say about that so as I'm talking to my client he asked me that question are you sure about this I have to think about this is this really the right thing for the client do we need to start out with this distributed architecture do we need to go full guns with one of the fastest most scalable most resilient platforms in the world we have to think about this and I think you know what rails is actually probably better at getting people up to speed then any platform I can think of outside of WordPress and so I have to tell them that I have to say that because that's the truth that isn't really serving my client and so I say to him well you know we could use rails we could get up to speed and we could and this is literally what he said to me is all I got out of my mouth what's up with that what's you don't like rails and he went on to tell me that he is based one business on Rails and one project that he ran at the glass company he worked at and after two years time they ended up with a big mess and they rewrote it it almost created his business and he said I'll never do that again I've had the same experience I don't mean to sit here and you know say rails sucks that's honestly not my point rails is great at a bunch of things you have to be very careful with a long-running rails project you just you just do and he just ran into trouble and the trouble that he ran into Internet when he ever he'd like talk about it with people the typical rails programmer response was can you guess not haters gonna hate but bad programmers write bad code and that drives me absolutely crazy like no this is a real problem people have is long running rails projects so now we have we have two concerns here we have a business concern getting people up to speed but we also have a long-running concern what are we gonna do in the future how we're gonna keep things up how are we gonna scale what are we gonna do about the teams I call this the dreible door spectrum on one hand you have dr. Dre write an amazing artist musician highly focused on business the guy knows business and how to make money I love this quote from him he made a million dollars in the bank before he could legally buy alcohol I mean he left deaf deaf wrote death row records he just left and he built his own business again on top I mean is it the guy's an amazing business man versus someone who is completely based on his beliefs and his convictions Dumbledore right and I love this quote as well you know we we have to choose between what's easy and what's right Wow how profound right well what how do we put this in terms of business let's take the one perspective let's go full business let's do with the DHH thing put our business man's hat on tell me why you can't solve my clients problem with WordPress and you cannot do it in terms of business in terms of getting up to speed getting out there and to put this in perspective 25% of the internet runs on WordPress when you take away all your beliefs about every programming language and you just look at what has been done 25% of the internet runs on WordPress 50 to 60% runs on PHP why aren't we using that that's an honest question if I have in a businessman town on and you have to answer that question I will say I can't and I don't think you can either but this is where we kind of break from reality a little bit because we don't do business all the time it's good to have these business perspectives in mind but we're also scientists I'm gonna claim that we are also computer scientists and we need to think about what we build for a client later on in the future this is never an answer right because a lot of people when they're confronted with these business concerns and why are we using a lick sir sometimes it falls back to this just because I want to you get into these debates and they usually end up something along this right tool for the right job that is as well that just means I don't want to think about what you're saying anymore yeah sure maybe ORMs suck yeah sure maybe this happens whatever right tool for the right job no no there is there is actually an approach that makes more sense than other approaches depending on where you are the dreible door spectrum seriously are we going business are we going computer science I'm gonna claim that all of us in this room are explorers all of us in this room are innovators all of us in this room are scientists and I think that is a really important thing to keep in mind as well as the business we also have to innovate and push things forward when I was younger I remember when the pocket calculator came out I'm not old and we were not allowed to have them in school because our math teacher said that you will not be able to do math in your head if you have a pocket calculator and actually he was right but still did we need a pocket calculator no in terms of dreible to our spectrum if I was a stray do you need a pocket calculator he would say no you don't need such a thing you can do it without it iPhone the personal computer did we need these things no we did not need them from a pure utilitarian perspective did we need to go to the moon at the time is this a big controversy believe it or not but now we look at the Apollo mission as something so much greater than fire and steel going to the moon it is it is the pinnacle of human experience for a lot of people that's arguable even today a lot of people of course don't think we went there but also would say it was a terrible waste of money but that is such utilitarian perspective right what about the other thing what about what it meant to humanity in general I don't know if you guys saw this the other day the Falcon Heavy landing the boosters coming in how freaky was that did we need to do this no we did not need to do this but for me as a child of the 60s and 70s of the space age uh-huh that needed to happen that was amazing this to me like everybody I know stopped what they were doing to stream this and they just talked about it for days and it reset their brains to something different it pushed their experience outward of to of what humanity is capable of I like to think that there is innovation that is just around the corner for the web and for computer science and everything that we do I feel like it's right there it's somewhere and you know I make fun of rails and ehh but the truth is the innovation that came with web 2.0 happened because of rails fact I would make this claim - that we wouldn't be here without rails without Ruby without DHH we are the next level here of that experience josée looked at looked at the beauty of Ruby and said you know what we can do this with Erlang and it's awesome what can we then do with that where's the next innovation what's the big change it's gonna happen I like to think it's out there although I will admit web 2.0 is kind of a lame name this is Marie Curie when my favorite scientist and I love this quote because it reminds me so much of why I love programming it reminds me so much of when I take the businessman town off and put on my scientist hat or my camera's hat what the inspiration is for me sitting down and writing programs and I love this this notion she got to go down in her basement with her husband who was also a scientist and and find out all these wonderful things about plutonium and radiation and whatnot but one of her quotes that I really really love is this one nothing is to be feared if you can understand it seek understanding so it's not enough just to discover it's not enough just to know it's like oh yeah elixir is rad why is it rad and then you can explain to other people you could tell them why it's so cool you can tell my was about to say really bad word you can tell my enterprise Microsoft friends why it's so cool without using bad words the neat thing is there's only one thing that we need to do is fellow scientist when it comes to understanding one thing shout it out if you think you know what it is simply to listen that's a good life goal for anything but especially the next two days while you're here while you're sitting in the rooms you're sitting here listening to the speaker's talk clear your brain empty all your preconceptions don't come here loaded with haters gonna hate kind of mentality because people are going to come up here and challenge you and challenge what you think and if we want to expand computer science and find that next innovation it's critical that we not just listen but truly listen empty the brain don't try to explain things to people don't think that they don't know what they're talking about just because you have an idea you think is right listen to what everybody's saying because it's so critical we right now in my mind are at a bit of a Renaissance point that's why I chose this graphic right here where we are literally changing humanity right now with computer science over the last 30 years the web has grown to a point where it's redefined human experience not just the web but also mobile everything about it I mean I literally do not recognize this world today from when I was a child with Twitter Facebook all the things you're capable of doing with that phone in your pocket overthrowing governments people talking to each other making friendships there's friends in here that I've met twice in person but I've known them for years and I feel like there are some of my very best friends in life which is weird to me that's really weird it's important that we recognize that we are at the Renaissance and we need to definitely treat it as scientists would we need to engage in a way that is what's the word I'm looking for as appealing and open as we possibly can because you don't get anywhere as I keep saying by pounding on each other screaming at people just saying elixir Phoenix what's wrong with you someone made a quip to me other day like oh what are you talk about you know you how much you hate Phoenix which is funny it was a joke but it's like you know we all have our opinions right we all have our opinions about what things are and maybe I don't like Phoenix and maybe I have not I shouldn't even say don't like cuz that's not even true I have issues with certain frameworks and ways that they do things let's talk about that because maybe one I'm misunderstanding something in two maybe you're not seeing something that I'm seeing things change and people don't like it when things change and unfortunately in our industry things are constantly changing and part of this part of part of growing and changing with it is to be able to speak to each other and understand I think it's really important to not just stand here and wave my arms and say in the last thirty years everything has changed it's true 1990 I think that happened like I don't know maybe before you guys were born 1990 there was one website and this is it this is the CERN website this is Tim berners-lee he made the web this is the very first web page ever made I love this this first link up here what's out there nothing's out there why it's just crazy nothing's out there the web did not exist until this page right here which i think is is amazing if you're curious yeah that's the HTML that's what it look like that's the first thing of course I did view source on that since then since then over 30 years have gone by and this is what the web looks like now it's gigantic as I mentioned it's changed everything about life about humanity over the last 30 years and I don't think people keep that in mind very much I don't think they have that perspective when they engage in a lot of technical discussions or go to conferences or whatever and it's early in the morning and you haven't had your coffee and you kind of sitting through this talk where this guy is just waving his arms a lot but I would love it if we could all just sort of think about that have that in the back of our heads that we are here at the tip of the spear literally something brand new it's something old elixir is so wonderful I can't I can't keep saying that enough I'm hoping that there's more that we can do with it because language shapes things language shapes capabilities of applications you kind of know it when you're looking at a certain type of application built in the language I know it when I'm looking at a dotnet web site I know it in a minute usually I know it when I'm looking at a crappy no JavaScript web site because usually doesn't work it's just true sorry don't be a jerk Rob the web is shaped by the languages we use and if we're gonna push this thing forward we really have to rethink what languages we're gonna use to do it the capabilities of those languages this is when you put on our scientist hat on our explorers and see what's possible and you see something is elegant and wonderful as a lick sir you would think that we could morph that into what the web looks like I'd like to do that because right now what I see when I look at the web honestly and this is me being a jerk again sorry I see kind of a trash pile I mean what JA I'm actually kind of discouraged with how much JavaScript is out there and I say this I try and say this not in a mean way even though it's gonna come out this way I've been doing nothing but node over the last six or seven years and I think about this sometimes this language is built over a 10-day period in 1995 Netscape needed to script its interface it is widely recognized as when has one of the worst language has ever created of course now it's being it's being repaired it's being made better but think about that perspective oh it's so much better these days we're fixing it great good for you let's build more stuff with it and stick it in containers and I think there's such a better way of doing things because right now where we're at is what herb Sutter calls the free lunch being over this was written back in 2005 but the idea is processors are not getting faster computers are kind of maxing out we need to now go sideways and start doing more concurrency its 2018 this is just how we build stuff right as a lick sir and Erlang people we know this of course concurrency was always going to be a thing we've known this since the 90s I think object-oriented languages are catching up to this but instead of making their language and their runtimes concurrent they're using architecture which is fine 0 mq RabbitMQ microservices hooray docker kubernetes all of these things are interesting and capable but the interesting thing that I always find is that it's reinventing Erlang and of course that's gonna sound like a challenge it's gonna sound negative to people that won't know what I mean by that and if I try and explain weather patterns all of these patterns that are being followed now by object-oriented languages were solved ish back in the 90s with Erlang I mean it's kind of an amazing thing and I say this and this is about as far as I get I say this as a way of saying that is a foothold for us to then rev on that pattern maybe let's create some new languages or Rev Erlang or do something to make this experience better other than throw another container up in the cloud I wrote a post about this I would say about a month ago and I had this interaction on Twitter with this person who just immediately thought I was being arrogant because I made the claim I made that claim that we are reinventing Erlang and I said do you think I'm just being arrogant I mean let's talk and I really tried to engage this person just absolutely door got slammed and they said do you know anything about Erlang this is how we end the discussion do you know anything about earlier you said I don't know actor/model there's no silver bullet that's the other quote I hate this is what I put in my post and I could see how this would come off as negative I can see how a lot of the things that I've been saying are negative and again I don't mean to stand up here and like crap all over every other platform even though it's how it's sounding but to see that the deficiencies that are out there and how they can be changed by something that you can you can then use a language that you like like a lick sir that perspective is gigantic and if we could just get past that hurdle of like you're being a dick Rob okay how about we talk now and looking I can explain to you why I think Erlang is a better solution than whatever I think about Joe Armstrong looking through his telescope that's not him actually pretty close to anything this is Galileo looking through his telescope at the moons of Jupiter the very first time that the moons of Jupiter ever seen with the naked eye and I think about what would what would happen if for some reason we had never seen the moons of Jupiter we'd never seen the rings of Saturn what would happen if that happened today and I think about that a lot like what if it hit hacker news these are actual quotes from Cardinals at his trial Bell ermine has this great one I love it to assert that the Earth revolves around the Sun is as erroneous as to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin but did them at the time that was just the way things were their beliefs shaped everything about the reality and they were just like whoa there's no way and Galileo's like but you just I have this telescope you can look through it and you can see and like nope that doesn't happen to put this in perspective for modern times this is Jeff Clark I don't know if anybody in here is into surfing at all I grew up in Los Angeles I love surfing but this is Jeff Clark and he's taking off in a wave at a break called Mavericks somebody here heard of Mavericks before yay Mavericks is consistently rated in the top five waves in the entire world it is one of the most amazing waves out there and it was discovered in 1992 which is crazy it's 30 miles south or excuse me 30 minutes south of San Francisco in Half Moon Bay it's really easy to get to you can see it from the top of a bluff Jeff Clark went to school in Half Moon Bay and he sat on top of this bluff and he looked out at these waves and he said you know what those waves are gigantic I'm gonna go ride him and his friends like you're crazy this is back in the 80s and so he decided one day after school he was gonna paddle out there it's about a half-mile paddle out from the bay and you get on these gigantic monster waves and he freaked out so he goes back and he starts trying to tell people and no one believed him and you know why didn't you know I no one believed him this is great I can't believe this happened in like when I was alive because those waves only happen in Hawaii there's no such thing as a 30-foot or 20-foot wave here in California so he tried to get his friends to take pictures to prove it and no one would believe it I didn't believe it like the first time I saw the the magazine article I'm like no those ways only happen in Hawaii there's no way that that kind of wave could happen here if he tried to bring it up in conversation people shut him down immediately nope doesn't happen here and if you tried to bring it up he got shouted at and finally is this funny finally surfer magazine' I remember this I bought this California goes off and this whole pictorial spread about Mavericks and people write what is that and next thing you know Hawaiians come over then they start riding it and they say yes like oh really okay all you had to do was to go out on this Bluff I've got a map here right down there at the bottom which you can't see sorry it's but right down there as Mavericks right off the tip of the bluff you just had to go 30 minutes south you could park right out there on the tip walk about 20 yards to get to the bluff bring a lunch it's beautiful it's a beautiful Drive you can go down there when you're getting your pumpkins because they have pumpkin patches everywhere and you can watch these ways you just had to look but no one believed it this is how I felt when I started learning elixir and then diving into OTP is this really he's always been here since in 90s why have I not been using this like why are more people using this is amazing and to me it was like dropping into like a gigantic wave just in my back yard like are you serious I have all this power right now and I want to wind this up by taking it all the way back to my client and are you sure about this Rob and I mean I have this experience now working with a bunch of languages I can use Dada I can use Ruby Noda I can use whatever yes I am sure about this not because I think it's amazing and well we got to use it but it's stable it's what I call low scale you can use one server probably for most of the duration of your of your of your application then just attach another now and Miriam together create a ring we can do all kinds of things that's concurrent you don't have to deal with kubernetes and ops which is a big concern these days because a lot of people are more focused on getting ops people as opposed to as opposed to worrying about the code and revving the code how we gonna stabilize this so what happened with this project well I started out using Phoenix and ecto and it was really cool this is what I need things that I love about elixir has best of both worlds I was able to kick things up get the PLC out get the MVP up show them all kinds of things with Phoenix and ecto and then he after the thing he said so what are we gonna do about this thing you know I don't want a big framework that was literally one of the requirements don't want a big framework and I'm like don't worry about it that's one of the cool things about elixir is that I can just roll my own I can use plug I can use cowboy I can just use these basic things and you don't have to worry about it because I can make exactly what you want and I hesitated when I put this slide in here because I figured that it might upset a few people in the room and if it did upset you what I just said about Phoenix and ecto ask yourself why why do you care why are you having this emotional response I actually have a lot of reasons for wanting to roll my own which yes I know sounds kind of crazy but to me I look at an inn kind of an exciting opportunity Quay which is I can I can I'm not locked into to having like bare metal craziness right there's a lot of supporting structures inside of elixir that allow me to toss whatever framework I want away I don't like dependencies that's my thing but you know what that's me if you have any questions about why I decided to do that let's talk I'll be here entire couple days come up and I'll be happy to tell you the experiences I've had in my life and same with my clients and why I feel like this is literally we're at the top of the wave or about to drop in and I am so excited to keep going with elixir I hope you have fun today and tomorrow be good and please let's listen to each other let's talk to each other let's listen to each other most importantly the experiences that you've had with your jobs I'll tell you the experiences I've had and hopefully we can learn and push this forward thank you [Applause]

Channel: Confreaks

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Length: 31min 38sec (1898 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 14 2018