Here are the slides from my recent Learn Elixir talk at Manchester Lambda Lounge, the monthly meet up for fan of functional programming languages in Manchester. This is my second talk there, the first, back in October 2016, was a show-and-tell on Assenty, the real-time Q&A web service I’ve been building at assenty.com.

In October I spoke about how Phoenix channels were the inspiration for the real-time Q&A functionality on Assenty. Because the focus of the presentation was the Channels component of the very versatile web framework that is Phoenix, I ended up giving a whistle stop tour of the Elixir programming language.

It went well but at the end of the talk, I sensed that there was appetite for some coding exercise. There was simply no time left though. Consequently I’m pleased to have been able to speak again on Elixir/Phoenix so relatively soon after.

The hope was that this time, with sufficient planning, and material, I would be able to walk people interested in starting with Elixir through an introduction to the exciting functional programming that it is. Attendance at the first talk was, small, but perfectly numbered as we had time to talk tech to a fairly detailed degree at the end.

I expected the same number to attend the second talk and was pleasantly surprised to find nine people seated and waiting for me when I walked into the MadLab in Manchester’s Northern Quarter a little before 7pm on Monday 20th February. The crowd was made up of developers from some of the North West’s well-known internet businesses, and IT consultants and at least one computer science student. There is indeed latent interest in Elixir in the UK’s North West!

It was billed as a ‘hands-on session’ and people were advised to bring along laptops to follow along, several did. I hope the slides provide enough material for those who wish to get started on their own at home. Hopefully in future, there will be a follow up – we only got started, really, there’s a lot yet to teach (and) learn on Elixir.

If you’re learning Elixir and these were of any help, or attended the talk at MadLab, do let me know in the comments!

Keep learning.