About two weeks ago I attended and spoke at Code BEAM Europe. My talk “Ruby Crimes in Elixir Codebases”, I believe, 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, potentially, develop into full talks and to somewhat defray the cost of attending I started pitching to conferences far and wide (Sessionizer makes this easy) and was overjoyed in early June to learn that Code BEAM had accepted me.
The conference itself was 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/Earlang Solutions were extremely communicative and helpful. During the actual 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 (although, 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!