ElixirConf 2017, Day Four
08 Sep 2017This the fifth in a series of posts describing my experience at ElixirConf 2017. Though it’s not required, you can read the prior posts.
Today is day four for me and today is the end of the conference! 
TL;DR? That’s a wrap on ElixirConf 2017. I went to a lot of great talks again today. ElixirConf 2018 comes back to Bellevue.
Keynote
Jose Valim went over the previous Elixir goals up to the 1.5 release, what the new goals for Elixir are, and how those new goals will affect upcoming features in Elixir 1.6.
Live APIs with GraphQL subscriptions
Ben Wilson and Bruce Williams give an overview of GraphQL and then dove into how to create live APIs with GraphQL subscriptions. Hugely complimentary to the training I was at on Wednesday.
Managing Tables with Elixir and OTP
Robert Beene gave a great beginner-friendly walkthrough example of how you can use the power of OTP to do we can all relate to: managing the tables in a restaurant. Robert kept it really low key and gave a great introduction for those folks that aren’t up to speed with all that OTP has to offer.
The Power of Zero
A reminder that we should be automating all the things and some ways to do it without breaking bank. Andrew Forward walked us through several ways to do this with our $5 ideas (i.e. the things we do that we spend $5 a month on with a basic box from DigitalOcean). Lots of great ideas here and a nice reminder that automation doesn’t have to be complex or expensive.
Building an Open Source, Real-time Forum with Phoenix and Elm
Josh Adams gave a whirlwind presentation of Firestorm - the open source real time forum - and its elm client. With Elm being based on ML, I hadn’t tried it yet, as I’m a bit scared by ML languages, but this quick intro made me want to give Elm a look.
Plugging the Security Holes in Your Phoenix Application
Griffin Byatt gave a really interesting presentation into the various things that can be insecure about your Phoenix apps and ways to avoid them. In particular, the following types of security issues were covered:
- denial of service attacks
- directory traversal attacks
- cross-site scripting
- SQL injection
- code execution
- session attacks
Elixir with Kafka
A basic intro to Kafka combined with an example of how to use Kafka with GenStage in Elixir. The GenStage stuff was over my head but I think this will be a good talk to go back and watch after I get some more knowledge under by belt
Closing Keynote
Chris McCord closed out ElixirConf by recapping some of the ideas behind the Phoenix 1.3 release as well as looking forward to Phoenix 1.4. I’m pretty excited to see where the metrics stuff he talked about goes as well as seeing what happens when they start to take advantage of the developer experience improvements José talked about earlier in the day that are in Elixir 1.5.
Final Thoughts
I enjoyed being able to come out to ElixirConf this year. I got to meet up
with some old friends that I hadn’t seen in awhile and meet some new ones. I
learned an absolute ton and will probably forget it just as quickly. Thank
goodness for YouTube. 
A massive thank you to my employer for paying for my trip this year. Also, a huge thank you to Jim Freeze and the organizating crew for a great conference.