In T-minus two days, members of the Elixir community will descend upon the great city of Austin, TX, to explore better ways to approach coding challenges. Taking place February 27-28, we’re thrilled to be sponsoring this year’s Lonestar Elixir event and hope to see you there.
DockYarders will be participating in and leading collaborative discussions throughout the event with several members of the team hosting sessions on topics ranging from Lumen to the Erlang Term Storage library and batch operations with Broadway.
Here is a snapshot of the DockYard sessions you can catch at Lonestar Elixir on Friday, February 28:
9:45 - 10:15 a.m. | Architectural Engineer Elle Imhoff presents “Lumen”
Unveiled in Fall 2019, Lumen is an alternative compiler, interpreter, and runtime to the BEAM designed for WebAssembly. Lumen allows Erlang and Elixir to run in the browser.
In this session, attendees will learn more about the Lumen project, including how it is a reimplementation of the BEAM in Rust. Using Rust, Lumen is able to leverage the cutting edge tools of the Rust WASM ecosystem.
Compiling Elixir and Erlang from source to LLVM IR, the Lumen compiler is able to do whole program optimizations allowing for dead-code elimination of parts of the user application, OTP, and the runtime itself. Eliminating the dead code makes shipping OTP size-competitive with JavaScript frameworks, while retaining the benefits of thousands of concurrent processes and supervision trees.
11:15 - 11:45 a.m. | Senior Software Engineer Mike Binns presents “Taming ETS”
By using Elixir to build web applications and other high-performance software, developers can benefit from one of its most powerful features: the ability to use the Erlang Term Storage library (aka :ets). ETS can often single-handedly replace entire caching products and strategies within a tech stack.
The Elixir core language currently does not have a wrapper around the :ets library, therefore users interact directly with the Erlang interface. As is the case with Erlang itself, the developer user experience is a bit rough around the edges, and can be confusing to Elixir developers trying to learn the library.
While there are many great resources on :ets and how to use it; this session will explore common pitfalls and how to avoid them. This talk will also introduce the ETS Elixir library and demonstrate how it can improve the Elixir developer user experience when working with :ets.
2:45 - 3:15 p.m. | Engineer Michael Crumm presents “Let’s Make a Pizza! Batch Operations with Broadway”
Thanks to Broadway, background data processing has never been easier. With a few lines of code, you can start consuming messages from Amazon SQS, Google Cloud Pub/Sub, RabbitMQ, and more. But how can you get the most efficiency out of your pipelines? With Broadway, the answer is simple: use batchers!
This talk will offer a deep dive into Broadway by examining a payments pipeline for a fake pizza kiosk system. Attendees will learn the basics of processing messages and then dive deeper on implementing batchers for increased efficiency. The session will also explore some of the trade-offs of working in batches and cover some idiosyncrasies across the different Broadway producers. Finally, attendees will learn how they can get the most value out of a batch-based workflow.
Whether you’re just getting started with Broadway, or you’ve already begun to implement your data pipelines, you’ll leave this session with a better understanding of the Broadway architecture as a whole and some new tricks to help get the most out of your pipelines.
Not able to attend? We’ll update this post with recordings of DockYard’s sessions, so you can have a front row seat from the comfort of your own device.
DockYard is a digital product agency offering custom software, mobile, and web application development consulting. We provide exceptional professional services in strategy, user experience, design, and full stack engineering using Ember.js, React.js, Ruby, and Elixir. With a nationwide staff, we’ve got consultants in key markets across the United States, including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago, Austin, New York, and Boston.
