How to be an Elixir champion - Dan Janowski | ElixirConf US 2025

[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] Thank you. Hello, I'm Daniel Janowski. I am the chair of the sponsorship working group at the Erling Ecosystem Foundation. I spent a lot of time working to understand what we need to enable our next steps as an ecosystem. Okay. Thank you. Um I'm not alone in this effort. We have a community- elected board uh Jonathan mentioned who is our ecosystem CISO and the participants of various working groups uh with only a few exceptions all are volunteer. I'm going to mention a lot of actionable items. If you have any questions about them or interested in getting involved or not sure how to get involved, please contact me. But first, we should just talk a little bit about what it is to be a champion. To become a champion requires an awareness of our collective needs, a commitment to dedicate some resources like time or money or expertise, and the intent to serve the community. The objective is with all of us as champions coming together to form some set of plans and then acting in coordination. First, I'll offer you some calibration from my perspective. I have to leave out more than I can include, but I'm happy to talk more about it with any of you. Okay, we're going to start with an alternate reality. To describe where we are, I'm going to offer a comparison to something we are not. Imagine Ericson built an Erlangbased web browser in the 1990s. The casual upsides to consider are pretty fantastical. Erlang would be JavaScript. Of course, hex could be npm, an npm nightmare, but let's sidestep that. And some of you are already jumping to sandboxing and security problems, but this is the 1990s. It's all fine. Imagine the scale of investment in the web runtime if the web runtime was Erlang. Of course, that didn't happen. Instead, our ecosystem and languages are not part of a ubiquitous product and development platform. We are not a language commercially backed by tool vendors. We are not funded by big industry players. We are self-funded. Progress and upkeep is up to us. We can only compete by coordinated use of our more limited resources. It also means we have added ecosystem costs and the added ecosystem cost is partly hidden. We also have to regularly make the case that our better technology and outcomes exceed these challenges. The cost of an alt brand like Elixir comes from the required increased community involvement of volunteers to build and maintain components and the commercial users having to both invest in the ecosystem by funding and man-hour as well as having to fill in for some missing processes. These added costs require persuasion to convince the increasingly MBA driven software product world. and in more challenging times like these to justify. So Jim Freeze once challenged me to describe Elixir in two words. Take a moment and think about what two words you might use. And I'll come back to this. We can and need to get better at telling the elixir story. We have to tune our messages to different audiences. the business story, the beginner story, the elevator pitch. We must show solid security and excellent developer experience. Many of us sell Elixir uh space services and have clear ideas of what works and what doesn't. We could share these insights and that would that would help. Okay, returning to two words. Were they technical? Were they about outcomes or inputs? Who would your words appeal to? Will they motivate or inspire? There is no right answer. But this illustrates the complexity of communicating what we offer. Different words and ideas are going to work in different situations. As part of our advocacy, we need to hone our messages and ensure the whole community knows what they are. We have to make the most of opportunities when they happen. Making it up on the spot is both hard and unnecessary. I didn't have a good answer for Jim, but Jim's words were efficient and reliable. But I'll tell you mine now, and I'm going to cheat because I can do it with one, and that word is confidence. It describes how I feel about the elixir code I write, the systems I deploy, the certainty of OTP, and my trust in the ecosystem. But it's not blind confidence, but it is gra v vastly greater than anything I've used before. So with the help of one Ambuja and mimicquate I've started we have started a project at the EF marketing working group that has the goal of building a web resource to help people with no prior Elixir exposure to help them understand how Elixir is different with different paths for technical people and decision makers. partly to convey that all programming paradigms are not the same, that the differences do matter, that Elixir can make goals reachable, that commercial efforts can find more success, that developers can find more rewarding work. The first few steps in the Elixir journey are critical. It is very easy to lose people here. This will take work and careful testing. I would like it to be further along and we could use more participation. Then there's outreach which is seeking out new people. We have to venture outside of our comfortable community following industry verticals as a as a strategy healthcare, manufacturing, aerospace, energy. Talking about successes in forums around verticals to mention Elixir's role in success creates awareness and curiosity. If we can reach founders, they are tomorrow's seauite and the explorer resources. We can give people the orientation they need to go further. For outreach, there is a stipend at the EF funded by Dashbit and Obam Pro to help people with expenses. Here's a fun example. Um, so Rob Kaiser presented an a distributed file system for OpenBSD at BSD CAN, which combined Erlang distribution and the Fuse file system to make a distributed file system. Uh that's a QR code to um to his uh slides. It's actually pretty fascinating. We found out about it kind of by accident. Okay. Um not yet. Uh all right. So I made up a word called inreach. We have outreach in reach and it's about conferences like this and also regional conferences and meetups. We have a bunch of new regional conferences this year. Alchemy Conf, Goat Meyer, XMEX, and there's one in Brazil that I don't know the name of. We also had another installment of Gig City Elixir. Can we go beyond this? I hope we can. And the EF wants to help. Covering the globe with smaller conferences brings the community together in meaningful ways and makes it accessible to more people. However, restarting meetups seems to be a challenge. Hopefully, the global elixir meetup will help. We need to keep trying. We need to get people together. The energy and connection from meeting in person builds a stronger community. We also need to improve our public appearance. Our internet presence is fragmented and a little stale. We have a basket of Slack and Discord servers, forums, websites, websites that are aggregation of other websites, years of YouTube videos, conference resources, white papers, calendars, the list goes on. And that's not unusual. But with some work, we can unite them and present a vastly better picture, bring out the value of all this work insider for the insider and outsider. After 10 years of Elixir, it's time to do a little home renovation. Let's give our contact content the impact it deserves. This needs a group of people that want to look at the information landscape and work out how to integrate it without causing additional fragmentation. Um, our challenges are not unique. We are free and open-source software. But what does that mean? If cost is your only focus, imagine after you initially add a dependency that it would never be updated. You could never get a bug fixed or a feature added. The only option would be to fix it yourself. Now that free software is time and money. If part of your mission critical stuff, if it's part of your mission critical stuff, you have to fix it or remove it. We mostly don't have this problem since volunteer maintainers usually fix bugs and make new releases. But I would like to suggest that free is about freedom. Freedom to use, freedom to change, freedom to integrate. The cost is part the cost part is an illusion. More importantly, open source is both critical infrastructure and the foundation of digital sovereignty. So, MercedesBenz wrote a forward in this EU study on the funding of digital infrastructure, and I'm going to read it to you. It is becoming increasingly apparent that the open-source software success story may not be sufficiently sustainable or resilient. While it is positive that there are increasing numbers of commercial consumers of open source software, far too few of these consumers are participating and contributing to the upstream projects. Meaning that the vast bulk of the burden of keeping these projects viable and secure falls upon unpaid volunteers, developers, and maintainers. Without sustainable funding and support, it is entirely foreseeable that critical components will degrade, leaving entire industries exposed to systemic risk. So, let's try to tie this back to our ecosystem. And I'm going to try to do that with two stories. The first one is open telemetry. Our open telemetry implementation is currently being worked on by these three people, Brian Ne Brian Nagel, Tristan Slaughter, and Greg Meford, and they've been working on Otel since 2018. I joined their observability working group call to check in on some project stipens. Tristan's project is released as experimental until it goes through official hotel evaluation, which is apparently hard to come by. Greg is working on something called the eBPF profile profiler to maintain par with other ecosystems. With it, the beam itself can be profiled using open telemetry. So I asked them if they needed help and Tristan responded, there are many hotel instrumentation contrib modules that are not maintained. Oops, it went twice. Okay. Um the modules support telemetry from core components like Phoenix and Ecto. Uh projects throughout the ecosystem use and depend on these modules. And by the way, I'm not saying that Phoenix or Ecto are unmaintained. Those are just examples. Casual contribution isn't practical because the standards context is needed to actually do the work. Okay. So here's the second and this is about security. So this is Jonathan Mansion, our chief information security officer. He is our ecosystem CISO. He started working for the EF in January of this year under a grant from Herman Ultrashaw. As CISO, Jonathan has been building the security infrastructure and standards implementation of the ecosystem. He has established our ecosystem CNA, the CBE numbering authority under the EEF. With the CNA, we directly handle vulnerability events within the ecosystem, such as how notifications and disclosures are managed. The government and industry cyber security requirements are increasing to deal with a hostile digital environment. And the EU is leading, but it is not alone. And action in one jurisdiction radiates outward. GDPR changed the world of web cookies well beyond EU boundaries. As the requirements evolved or e evolve, our ecosystem needs to respond and keep up with the EU cyber resiliency act and NIS2. Things like CE marks will depend on compliance. Manufacturers will be held responsible for full product life cycles and supply chain auditing and security will be required. These are some of the industries that are um affected. So I asked Jonathan about his talk from earlier today from freakout to fix navigating a security disaster. One of his goals is to move beyond improvising to be the community resource driving broad adoption uh of industry best practices and with the CNA to have the right process for dealing with vulnerabilities. Jonathan said, "If we don't want to be left behind, the time to implement these new standards is now and not in five years when every place on earth requires it and we don't have it." Now, maintaining the certifications we already did like the OpenSSF, open chain certification for Elixir, we need staff to do these things because it's not something someone can do just in their free time. It's quite specialized in a lot of places as well. Finally, he said, "It would help knowing if I had a job for longer than three months at a time, it would be good if we could plan further ahead and do bigger things. But as it stands, things will sit on my list because I'm not sure if I can finish them. Crucial work should be compensated and crucial work should be coordinated. Micro payments and GitHub sponsorship is a patch but not a solution. They don't create sustainable and scalable support for developers. Only by pooling our resources can we make strategic choices to fund projects and build the support that projects needs to be sustainable. And a really good example of this is the LSP project. It was only by combining the sponsorship of Fly.io, River, and Towspace that we could get to a public release of the ambitious multi-way merge and reformulation of our LSP. We can do things together if uh if we need we can do things together that we need if we put our resources together. We will soon be launching a Kickstarter to build the next generation of rebar. It is the build tool for Erlang and we use it transitively in Elixir. But when you use ASDF to install a new version of OTP, the current linear make file build process would be transformed into a faster paralyzed build process. The EF exists to coordinate our ecosystem finances, human resources, and to plan for the long term. The EF is our foundation. It is us. It is our collective voice. It is our community rally point. Our whole ecosystem united under one flag. ensuring the ecosystem is relevant and sustainable now and into the future. And this may sound like an expend extended pitch for the EF. After all, we are in Florida and maybe you've already had a time share pitch. We are confronted constantly with pleas for money and it numbs us to inaction. But may I suggest that this is different. This is about investing in ourselves, in each other, and in the future. The EF is the place to concentrate and coordinate those resources with transparency and greater impact. We all want Elixir to thrive. Investing in the ecosystem is a way to ensure that we can keep choosing Elixir. Without it, we will fall behind and we will not be able to backfill deficits. The answer is each of you and everyone in the community that's not here. Things you can do are join the EF and if you can't afford it, uh, pay for your membership, join the EF Slack and get involved. If you're a decision maker, please sponsor. If you are not a decision decision maker, talk with your management about sponsorship. Attend or start local meetups and regional conferences. Use your interests and skills to give Elixir more impact. The diversity of our community is our strength and we need the EF to represent that community, the community. I hope you can see that getting involved is what we must all do. If you have questions or ideas, I would like to hear from you. I'm interested in finding ways for you or your company to get involved. Thank you. [Applause] Thank you, Dan. Um, if anybody has any questions, you can. We have time for like maybe one more in the swap swap card app, but for now, uh, I have one question is, I don't like talking in front of people. What can I do? >> Oh, well, you don't have to talk in front of people, but you can help make the material that people who talk in front of people use. So, there's plenty of opportunity for contributing to the content. That is one of the things that we don't have enough of is it's really hard to conceive of like sending people out into the wilderness with like no backup. So creating the materials that those people can use, the approaches that they can use is just as important as actually showing up in person. >> All right, thank you. That's awesome. Uh let's give Dan another round of applause. [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]

✨This talk was recorded at ElixirConf US 2025. If you're curious about our upcoming event, check https://elixirconf.com✨ Being an Elixir champion in challenging times requires more than better programming or system design. It demands that we each take on some responsibility for community growth and ecosystem promotion. The world beyond our borders, those unaware of OTP and unversed in the power of our languages, need to be tempted by prospect of our elegant, economical, and durable solutions. Only through collective action as a community can we broadly seed these ideas to foster acceptance and adoption. This session will provide context, a road map, and actions any member can take to realize these goals and ensure a strong and growing Elixir. Key Takeaways: Areas of need within the ecosystem and objective audiences in need of connection. A selection of actions individuals can take to engage and deepen connections within the community, and to build resources and capacity for outreach. Approaches and materials needed and available to help members conduct outreach to a variety of audiences. Let's keep in touch! Follow us on: 💥 Bluesky: https://elixirconf.bsky.social 💥 X: / elixirconf 💥 LinkedIn: / elixirconf