Tyler Young

Application-Focused Elixir Developer

I’m a full-stack Elixir developer building my own software-as-a-service platform for monitoring clients’ web sites. In the past, I’ve worked in a number of soft real-time, distributed systems domains, including collaborative mapmaking, flight simulation, networking, video streaming, and IOT command-and-control systems. I fell in love with the Elixir language in 2019, when I used it to build a massively multiplayer game server for the X-Plane flight simulator, and I’ve been working primarily with Elixir ever since.

Talk:
Elixir is the One-Person Stack for Building a Software Startup

Audience: Intermediate

There’s a lot of excitement in the developer community around the idea of a “one-person” framework—a platform on which a single developer can gain enough leverage to build a complete software service. In this talk, I’ll share:

  • How Elixir, Phoenix, and LiveView deliver on this promise for the startup I’m building
  • How the benefits of Elixir don’t end at the framework level, but expand to be a complete one-person stack
  • Which frameworks, libraries, and tools I combine for maximum effectiveness as a solo developer
  • Why I believe Elixir is the best choice for pragmatic software-as-a-service founders—even those who subscribe to the admonition that you should choose ““boring,”” stable technology

OBJECTIVES

A lot of the excitement around Elixir is generated by trailblazers and early adopters, people who are excited about the tech itself and the new possibilities it unlocks. There’s nothing at all wrong with that, but I’d like to focus on why Elixir should appeal to someone who is deeply pragmatic, whose number one concern is getting to market and iterating quickly in the search for product/market fit.

AUDIENCE

A great many developers with traditional jobs dream about one day starting their own software service. This talk is primarily for them, but I think it will also appeal to developers on small teams for whom productivity and developer effectiveness are also paramount.