John Mandalakas is a software developer at NFI Industries, where he has been using elixir to build out an event-driven logistics system for the last six years.
About a decade ago, he escaped a harrowing career in international finance by attending Dev Bootcamp, where an instructor once showed him Racket; he has been hooked on functional programming since that moment.
When not coding in esoteric programming languages, he is spending time with his family, riding bikes, cooking, exploring forests, or pretending to farm in his backyard.
Level: Introductory and overview
This talk is about the base foundation of most modern technology: agriculture.
Beginning in human prehistory, we venture through time, exploring how agriculture first came to be, and how it has evolved into its current dominant form(s). Using programming paradigms as analogies we will discuss where things stand and how they might want to change in order to improve sustainability of human societies.
If this wasn’t already cool enough, I will most likely show some pictures of my family’s backyard chickens and perhaps my friends’ sheep in order to demonstrate how we programmers can and do use elixir and nerves to [over]engineer distributed agricultural solutions.
But most importantly, we will discuss why erlang and distributed systems generally could be considered a desirable future model for climate resilience in agriculture, and how we as technologists might be uniquely positioned to enable that possibility.
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