Description

Elixir Brasil is an annual conference in São Paulo that brings developers and entrepreneurs together to learn about the latest applications of the programming language Elixir. Elixir is a functional, distributed, fault-tolerant programming language built on the Erlang Virtual Machine.

I presented with my coworker on the data processing pipeline called Broadway, which had just released shortly before the conference. Our talk was titled: Using Distillery, Peerage, and Broadway to process reviews for over 20,000 car dealerships - going from naive deployments to OTP releases.

The Problem

Our biggest challenge was explaining the technical implementation details in a 45-minute presentation. I learned a lot about how to condense technical information into presentation-ready descriptions using metaphor, diagrams, and straightforward language.

We also had to migrate our review processing service to use a brand new library, which had only been released for one month. Documentation was in its early stages and only a few data sources were supported. Other data sources, such as Amazon S3, had to be supported by our custom code.

Planning

We rebuilt our data processing pipeline for Podium’s car dealership reviews in Broadway, building a custom “Producer” to source data from Amazon S3. It was an incredible learning opportunity to migrate a core service to Broadway.

We then built a demo and presentation around this project. Before heading to São Paulo for the conference, we gave an interactive talk at a local Elixir meetup in Utah and incorporate their detailed technical feedback into our presentation.

Outcomes

We presented to over 250 Elixir developers and other members of the community. I was able to refine my presenting and public speaking skills as well as utilize my skills in writing. Working with a coworker on a project outside our normal responsibilities at Podium was an incredible experience.

Getting to meet a wide range of Elixir developers and contributors - as well as visiting the Plataformatec and Nubank offices - is a memory I will always cherish.