This is the talk I gave at ElixirConf 2015 on October 3rd, 2015.

And here are the slides for the presentation.

My favorite response to the presentation so far has been this tweet by Taylor Brooks:

At the store picking up diapers, waiting in line, and the only thing I'm thinking about is Erlang/OTP. /@stevenproctor #myelixirstatus

— Taylor Brooks (@taylorbrooks) October 3, 2015

The Abstract for the talk is:

This talk will give you an overview of the power and richness that the larger Erlang ecosystem provides; including features that you might not even know exists, as well as some of the ways of thinking about programs when running on the BEAM, Erlang’s Virtual Machine.

Be it Scala, Clojure, JRuby on the JVM, or F# on the .NET CLR, you can be productive in the language, but without spending some time educating yourself about the larger ecosystem, you wouldn’t expect to take full advantage of the power you get from running on that VM.

The same is true for Elixir and the BEAM. While you can get far using just Elixir alone, you will miss out on the what that Erlang community brings to running on the BEAM.

By opening your mind to the broader ecosystem, you gain an advantage over everyone who never looks beyond Elixir.

This talk will give you overviews of

What OTP gives you that you don’t have to do yourself, for when you have to have more power than simple agents and tasks
What the Erlang VM does to help you manage concurrency
How you can take advantage of types in a dynamic language
How to take your automated testing beyond just simple unit and integration style testing
Ways to monitor a live running application on the BEAM

Stay tuned here for the link/embed of video when it becomes available, and answers to questions that you or anyone may have.