Dave Thomas, TweetPragmatic Programmer turned Publisher

Biography: Dave Thomas

Dave Thomas (@pragdave) is a cornerstone of the Ruby community, and is personally responsible for many of its innovative directions and initiatives. Dave is a programmer, and now he is an accidental publisher. He wrote The Pragmatic Programmer with Andy Hunt at the end of the '90s, and that experience opened a new world for them. They discovered a love of writing that complemented their love of learning new things. Dave is one of the authors of the Agile Manifesto, and he is probably responsible for bringing Ruby to attention of Western developers with the book Programming Ruby. He was one of the first adopters of Rails, and helped spread the word with the book Agile Web Development with Rails. He enjoys speaking at conferences, running public and private training. But most of all, he loves coding.

Presentation: TweetElixir: The Power of Erlang, the Joy of Ruby

Time: Wednesday 11:00 - 11:50 / Location: Gold Coast

I’m a language nut. I love trying them out, and I love thinking about their design and implementation. (I know, it’s sad.)

I came across Ruby in 1998 because I was an avid reader of comp.lang.misc (ask your parents). I downloaded it, compiled it, and fell in love. As with any time you fall in love, it’s difficult to explain why. It just worked the way I work, and it had enough depth to keep me interested.

Fast forward 15 years. All that time I’d been looking for something new that gave me the same feeling. Then I came across Elixir, a language by José Valim, that puts a humane, Ruby-like syntax on the Erlang VM.

Now I’m dangerous. I want other people to see just how great this is. I want to evangelize. So come along and let me show you the things that I think make Elixir a serious alternative for writing highly reliable, scalable, and performant server code.

And, more important, let me show you some fun stuff