Event Highlights – ThoughtWorks Women: Be Bold for Change

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That’s the view from the ThoughtWorks offices on the 26th floor of the City Tower in Piccadilly Gardens, as the sun sets across Manchester on Monday 27 March.

I was there to attend an incredibly engaging ThoughtWorks Women event celebrating International Women’s Day and the conclusion of Women’s History month. There were inspiring, lightning talks by inspiring speakers, women who had a story to tell on being bold for change, and diversity beyond gender.

This is just a short recap of the event.
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Learning Elixir at Manchester Lambda Lounge

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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.

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Build Your Own Real-Time Web Service with Elixir/Phoenix: Assenty Show and Tell

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Here are the slides from my recent talk at Manchester Lambda Lounge.

Aimed at a largely non-Erlang/Elixir audience, the talk was about the soft real-time aspects of Elixir/Phoenix and its WebSocket implementation (aka Phoenix channels) – the main inspiration behind the real-time Q&A web service at assenty.com

Manchester Lambda Lounge, in their own words,

“meets monthly to talk about and popularise new ways of thinking about computation. Frequent topics include functional programming, type systems, programming language design and aspects of computer science.”

As Elixir is still relatively new, and case study materials on the Phoenix web framework thin on the ground, I focused on explaining the core components of the web framework with an emphasis on Phoenix channels and, the rationale behind Phoenix and Elixir.

The presentation concluded with a live demo of Assenty. Here is the resultant question board which includes questions asked and answered live by the audience.

I’ve embedded the question that won Gold Question Award below!

It was a good opportunity to meet active members of Manchester’s growing functional programming community to talk code and I look forward to attending another event.

Meet Assenty, the Elixir Phoenix-powered social Question Board service

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I started learning Elixir nearly two years ago and love the concurrency, fault-tolerance and scalability paradigms its Erlang heritage brings to the table. I discovered Phoenix in early spring 2015 when I was looking for Chicago Boss with an easier learning curve 🙂 For the non-developers reading this, Chicago Boss is a web framework for the Erlang programming language. Erlang is not renowned for its learning curve but is acclaimed for its reliability. Just ask WhatsApp.

I digress…

Today, after nearly seven months of hard work in stealth mode, I’m thrilled to launch Assenty, a service I’ve built with Elixir to provide real-time Q&A support for event organisers, using Phoenix channels.
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Viva La Blogger

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Welcome to my new blog! I’ll be sharing my journey from social media marketing aficionado to software engineer, via starting a company or two. Many of the initial posts will be programming-language specific and consequently very technology-heavy so please be aware of that.

I started blogging again because I started a new company called Assenty, and had to come out of a long-standing hibernation from social media, brought on from the combined fatigue of years of working as a social media consultant.
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