Yesterday was such an amazing day!
First of all, a huge shoutout to my friends at Invideo for putting together the first edition of Bombay.ex, the Mumbai Elixir users meetup. The team at Invideo has been supporting the Mumbai tech scene by hosting the Mumbai Rust users group as well and seeing as they're winning with Elixir as well it is quite logical that they do this as well. What did not go as per expectations was the overwhelming response from Mumbai techies. More than 50 software engineers turned up which was surprising because one assumes that Elixir would be a sort of niche pursuit.
A lot of the people there were Elixir users but a lot of 'just curious' people as well. People are building all kinds of things with it. Invideo of course has its whole backend in Elixir. There was also a presentation by IDfy where they use Elixir to power a lot of services. People in the crowd were also using it to build all sorts of cool things. The energy in the room was amazing! People had come from as far away as Pune and Jaipur.
If you're not familiar with Elixir, you should definitely check it out. Elixir is Ruby-ish syntax for erlang, the notoriously syntactically dense language that Ericsson invented to power their telephone infrastructure. The problem domain was so difficult that actually it turned out that writing almost a whole operating system was the better answer than trying to use existing technology. As a result erlang's BEAM VM does everything a microservice architecture can do just straight out of the box. It's everything - message passing, queues, service discovery, supervisors, circuit breakers, pub sub - the whole kit and kaboodle in a 10MB download, extremely performant and now wrapped in a nice syntax with Elixir and with not one but two great web frameworks. Phoenix Live View is a revolutionary way to build reactive web interfaces.
I know that I will be writing the agent infrastructure for svsrecruiting.com in Elixir.
But that's not all. One of my friends had come bearing gifts so after the meetup we had another meetup - a sort of unofficial Mumbai mechanical keyboard meetup and I left the venue having scored a Glove80. It is an incredible piece of gear. I am still getting used to it but it made me suddenly realise how underpowered the standard keyboard is. And the premium workmanship and the sound of the keys - they make me feel really awesome. Good gear is such an important part of the craft. It's not everything of course, but premium tools built by craftsmen can inspire us to achieve similar heights in our work.
Going to the meetup reminded of how amazing it is to be a software engineer, how beautiful the community is and how we come together to share our knowledge and learnings. It's almost like a satsang. I love it and I feel privileged to be a part of this community. One day I'll do a post on the great community builders of Indian software scene - the unsung heroes providing the support and admin to organise meetups and conferences across the land.
Kudos to you all.