Syncing on code

Time to give an update on what is happening around the ecosystem. Code BEAM Europe in Haarlem (The Netherlands, not The Globetrotters) was my first event since running Goatmire. I went in my own capacity, got a comped ticket and was subsequently roped into helping host a track. Introducing speakers and so on.

This was actually quite nice because it is the first time in a while I watched a full day of talks. And also my track had a really nice variety of people and topics. The strangest confluence of demographics was that there were two separate women speaking who both had Erlang as their first production/job programming language. Both had more time on the BEAM than me. Both were first time speakers. This is something that the Code Sync crew who puts on Code BEAM and ElixirConf tend to do very well. Encouraging new people to speak. Encouraging women and minority groups to present.

Gleam is really showing up in the community noticeably now. Overall a younger group of devs. Active, doing interesting stuff and I love to see the wild cross-over happening between the life-long Erlang devs and this new crew. Overall seems to be going well. And they are doing the Gleam Gathering (TODO: link) again, this time in London.

The biggest common theme for me at this conference was about funding the EEF's continued security work. We are applying for grants and things but we really need companies to step in and be EEF sponsors (TODO: link). Jonatan (EEF CNA), Peter (EEF vulnerability bloodhound) and Eric (Hex maintainer) should all be funded by the ecosystem to keep doing what they are doing and ideally be able to focus full time on that. It wouldn't take a lot of companies pitching in to get there and the cost of everyone going at it alone is .. dire.

It is easy to assume a foundation has a bunch of money. Somehow. By virtue of being a foundation. We simply don't. We are doing a lot with very little.

Jonatan and Peter on 1.3 full-time developer roles are up there fighting the Microsofts and Mozillas on the numbers in reporting and getting vulnerabilities fixed. And we consistently stay at the top of all boards covering CVE reporting data quality, enrichment levels. Thanks entirely to Jonatan getting his system stress-tested via Peter and working through how to automate the process more and more. Of course built out in Elixir.

Some talks covering AI but not overwhelmingly. Lots of people building on their established and real projects. A lot of talks going into the OTP building blocks in various ways.

Funding things and dealing with AI, in one sense or another were probably the big through-lines I saw. And it is very much what I think most of us are struggling with. In one way or another.

It was lovely to meet the wider BEAM community again.

Thanks to Monika, John, Ewa, Paulina and the rest of the crew for a good couple of days in lovely Haarlem.

Thank you for reading. I appreciate it.