This system doesn’t get heavy usage, but for a legacy Rails app that I’ve spent the last year upgrading and adding features too it’s nice to see this right in the peak of “busy season”.

Fall in the Japanese Garden.

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!

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.

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’m excited to announce that I’ll be speaking at BEAM Europe in October. Would love to see you there and/or if your in the greater Haarlem area, happy to meet up!

Tickets are on sale now over at https://codebeameurope.com/ . Drop into my session if your interested in looking at how Ruby/OOP patterns can sneak into Elixir code bases when first adopting Elixir and how to refactor/avoid these.

My daughter uses the same backpack I did 30 years ago! Hail to the once great, and again trendy Jansport.

I also love that she’s adorned it with some finger knitting!

First big snow

Another Christmas card

My wife and I have started painting our Christmas cards. I’m a big fan of Owen Pomery’s style, it kind of reminds me of Hergé. I copied this from Victory Point