Travis Fantina

About two weeks ago I attended and spoke at Code BEAM Europe. My talk, “Ruby Crimes in Elixir Codebases”, will be available in early 2027; at some point I may expand some of the ideas in the talk as blog posts here or post a condensed version but that may not be for a few months if at all.

Conference speaking, and tech conferences in general were new to me. I’ve always aspired to both attend a conference and, eventually, speak at one. Being a consultant contracting, primarily with a small dev shop means I don’t have a deep-pocketed overlord willing to send me off to technical conferences far and wide. I reached a point where I figured I could make it happen myself or it likely wouldn’t. Because I had several topics that I felt I could develop into full talks and to somewhat defray the cost of attending I started pitching to conferences (Sessionizer makes this easy) and was overjoyed in early June to learn that Code BEAM had accepted me.

Held in Haarlem’s Philharmonic (Phil.) which, like most of Haarlem, is a beautiful old building that would feel like walking into history if it hadn’t been so thoroughly modernized. From an organization perspective, everyone was super on top of things, Monika and the whole team from Trifork/Erlang Solutions were extremely communicative and helpful. During the conference I came in the morning and left in the evening; effortlessly drifting between sessions and breaks. This frictionless experience at an event only comes from an inordinate amount of prep and behind the scenes work from organizers; I give a lot of credit to the team who made for such a smooth experience.

I’m somewhat myopic in my web-world of Elixir/Phoenix building, mostly, CRUD apps and APIs. Going to a conference where people were using the BEAM for music production, embedded systems, local-first applications and more was inspiring. I left with about 4 projects I want to dig into in the next year (sadly, this conference was unable to magically grant me more time to pursue side projects). What inspired me the most was the number of people who were coding for the fun of it, limiting their use of LLMs or eschewing them entirely, at least in hobby projects. Regardless of your feelings on AI it’s refreshing to find pockets of technologists who are still in it for the love of code and not satisfied to simply write prose, pull a lever and see what the pattern machine spits out.

The economics of intercontinental travel, family life, likely means I won’t be able to attend in 2027 but if I can make 2028 work I’d be thrilled to!

Writing raw SQL queries and having something complex work rekindles those early highs I got when I was first learning to program with Ruby back in the day.

Katie Zacharia is “stepping down” after 5 days… That’s just about half a Scaramucci for context (anything to not use the metric system).

My youngest, who just turned two started doing these drawings. She spends twenty or thirty minutes on each and everything ob the page is something. She will point to a spot: ”thats monkey!” Or ”thats Pumpkin” (our cat). I’m here for it… and the final product is a pretty cool pattern.

Wonder how many commit messages end with some variation of :wq?

Diffs like this make me proud… Admittedly I also wrote all those 1365 lines; no regrets! They worked in production for about three years, the client switched vendors, the process is more streamlined now my work around was no longer needed.

“I don’t remember signing up for this” is an option, but you did not include “I DID NOT sign up for this” as an option. You must understand, nobody in the history of the world has ever signed up for a mailing list.

Got a notice from Google that my Chrome plugin was removed from the web-store. Which is a bit of a laugh. I wrote it about 8 years ago when I worked at an insurance company, I can’t remember the details but it correctly formatted pasted URLs from various policy documents. That is to say, niche.

I accidentally stumbled across the OpenAI store not because I wanted too it was a link chain I followed blindly (don’t be mad!) I couldn’t help but notice that the hucksters at OpenAI are selling a $40 t-shirt with the words “Good Research Takes Time” which is not only sadly ironic but also tone deaf. The people who are working tireless to destroy or reasoning abilities, think for us, and remove any kind of academic inquiry or curiosity about the world are loudly proclaiming “good research takes time”. I mean I agree but it seems antithetical to their entire brand.

I gotta stop going on Linkedin, sometimes I genuinely want to see what a colleague is up to or I need to post something I’m working on (speaking at a conference this fall gotta rep it). My feed is now, essentially 100% rage bait, the unhinged toxic “rise and grind” people are out of control and somehow it’s all I’m shown!