Spring Snow

A rundown of our whirlwind trip to Chicago for what will hopefully be the first of many Elm in the Spring conferences. The talks where great, the community is awesome, and we explore the tinge of jealousy for those working in Elm on a day to day basis.

Elm in the Spring A huge shoutout and thank you to the organizers: Blake Thomas @dijjnn
Alex Koppel @arsduo
Caroline Artz @carolineartz also xt thank you for the awesome socks! Colleen Sain @colleeninsain
Doug VonMoser @dougvonmoser
Special shoutout to friend of the show Anthony Deschamps programing Robots with Elm. It was great to catch up in Chicago, if only for a moment. All of the talks were top notch, original content, beautifully delivered. I was mentally fried by the end of the day. The library was a great space. I remembered what a coat rack was, and special thanks for the incoming blizzard the next morning as my plane received not 1, but 2 de-icing to get out and on it’s way to the sunny desert. Favorite moments - Andrew MacMurrary @a_macmuray went through his experience of building a game, Seeds the game let’s be real, games demo so well, and Andrew’s game is absolutely gorgeous Dan Abrams @thedanabrams. on his crazy screenplay parser and some of the hoops he’s gone through to get that working
Emma Cunningham for confirming that every things is at it’s core, a parsing problem. She was making some crazy bookmarklet’s and browser extensions in Elm. Which is crazy when you thing that you don’t ever directly manipulate the DOM with elm!!!! But capturing the DOM, parsing it in and spitting it back out of Elm! And that was just the start! Noah Gordon @noahzgordon had a very thoughtful talk to start a dialog about naming conventions for msgs that really struck a cord. From someone how really struggles to thoughtfully name things in the moment, having some sort of standard matrix for naming things that removed as many decisions as possible sounds awesome to me. and he’s examples and reasoning for them was pretty sound. I also had a stark realization that working on the side in Elm, doesn’t really cut it. Scripts, tutorials, even the safety of building Elm inside of an existing React app, while a great experiment feels a bit like cheating back to the safely of JS whenever I don’t know something. So stopping the tutorial cycle. I am going to try and build a more or less “original” (that’s in air quotes) app in Elm. From the ground up. Then stands the question. In order to really get into this realm of which I’m talking about Static Types and Functional paradigm. Do I need to find a job in that area? Can I successfully reach a higher level of understanding in this field, while working on it ‘in my spare time’ ? or am I asking for burnout. Give everyone a bit of background, when I had a similar thought about JS. If this was something that I was serious about learning to the core, then I had to chance up my direction. That’s when I starting teaching JS at a 12 wk ground bootcamp. The idea was in order to really understand JS at it’s best, I’d have to teach it day in and day out, over and over. I took a very Kyle Simpson approach. And that spurred additional things like this podcast. So I wonder, what would be something similar to do with Elm.   Follow JavaScript to Elm Twitter: @jstoelm
Email: [email protected]
Jesse Tomchak Twitter: @jtomchak
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