Achievements of BEAM community in 2021. Erlang, Elixir and more
2021 has been a very long year. Lots of achievements of BEAM community.
Contributors are working so hard, we wanted to cheer them up 🎉🎉.
So we came up with this post.
We contacted book authors, open source project maintainers, Community maintainers. Contacted through Twitter, Slack, Email.
We asked everyone these question(s).
1. What is the biggest achievement of the Erlang or Elixir community in 2021?
2. What is your biggest personal achievement as a member of such community?
3. Achievement of your Library/Book/ local BEAM Community.
Here are all the Answers.
FullstackPhoenix, A boilerplate by Andreas Eriksson.
There have been 3285 boilerplates generated this year and compared to 1198 during 2020.
The Phoenix Boilerplate generator is a way for developers to configure and get a jumpstart on a new Phoenix application. They have automated the installation of some common packages so you dont have to spend a lot of time on it.
Elixir Book Club
Organised by by Frank Kumro
We are on our 5th book, with over 32 meetings already held. Each meeting has 10–15 members involved and our events are every 2 weeks on a Sunday for 1 hour.
Club has Read these Books.
- Designing Elixir Systems with OTP
- Property-Based Testing with PropEr, Erlang, and Elixir
- Concurrent Data Processing in Elixir
- Elixir In Action
- Programming Phoenix LiveView
Anyone is welcome to join at any time. Meetings are held on our discord server. You can find the current book we are reading, along with meeting information and a discord server link at https://elixirbookclub.com.
We got the biggest prize pool in the history of the event yet.
A team successfully implemented an EEP and contributed to OTP itself
We held our first online SpawnFest meetup.
SpawnFest is an annual 48 hour online software development contest in which teams from around the world get exactly one weekend to create the best BEAM-based applications
Daniel Widgren, cofounder of Nova framework
New Nova routing that is not based on Cowboy routing. This helps us do explicit routing. Also we introduced models (but still in beta).
Nova was started 2019, today we want more developers/companies to use it and in the future we want Nova to be like what Phoenix is for Elixir.
In 2021, the Nerves project released Nerves Livebook which makes embedded Elixir programming even more accessible and has started changing how the Nerves community demos and shares hardware-based projects, experiments and libraries.
We also had a number of 1.0.0 releases, two books published by PragProg and a regular Nerves newsletter started.
Nerves is the open-source platform and infrastructure you need to build, deploy, and securely manage your fleet of IoT devices
With 31 releases, a bunch of new features, and lots of new friendly faces in the discord server, it has been Gleam’s best year yet!
Two of our favourite features have been the new Gleam build tool, which levels up the developer experience, and the Gleam compiler JavaScript backend, which allows Gleam to run in browsers, on CDNs and more.
BeamRad.io, a new podcast about all things BEAM, was launched in 2021 by Lars Wikman, Bruce Tate, Alex Koutmos, Steven Nunez, and Sophie DeBendetto with the excellent editing support of Maggie Tate.
BeamRad.io, sponsored by Grox.io, released 23 episodes covering everything from teaching Elixir and Functional Programming, to using Elixir and LiveView in production, to Elixir and Observability, and more.
Tune in in the new year for more interviews with the developers and community members who are pushing Elixir and the BEAM to new and greater heights!
Brujo Benavides, Erlang Developer & Trainer.
My list of favorites would be:
The JIT compiler in Erlang/OTP.
The new @erlangforums.
The multiple new plugins for rebar3, like rebar3_hank, rebar3_depup, rebar3_sheldon. beamoji… Even rebar3_plugin
And my personal one: my first academic paper with Laura M. Castro: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.08699
Kamil Skowron, Author of Hands-on Elixir & OTP: Cryptocurrency trading bot
Kamil Skowron and his YouTube channel surpassed 1000 subscribers with 22k+ views of his videos dedicated to hands-on learning of Elixir & OTP by building cryptocurrencies trading bot. Side by side, he’s working on a book focused on the same topic which introduced further 3.5k+ readers to the Elixir&OTP world.
Susumu Yamazaki (ZACKY), co-author of Pelemay / KK-SHiFT.
Japanese Elixir engineers and communities achieved the following.
More Japanese got active in Open Source development and ElixirConf.
Many Japanese Elixir communities started, their synergies, and new movements
Bruce Tate, Author Seven Languages in seven weeks.
In 2021, Bruce Tate co-wrote three books: Programming Phoenix LiveView, Build a Weather Station with Nerves, and Build a Binary Clock with Nerves, in addition to two Groxio self-study courses: Ecto and Nx. He was also active on the Elixir conference circuit, offering talks, keynotes, and trainings.
Ash was created in October 2019, and is close to its official (non-beta) release.
While it still growing significantly, the core is stable and production ready, all that is left is to rework the documentation and perhaps increase general test coverage.
Some highlights for 2021 are AshAdmin (a push-button admin UI), and AshPhoenix.Form, tools to build forms with phoenix and live view that work seamlessly against your resource definitions.
Adolfo Neto
Associate Professor at @UTFPR_Curitiba
Podcaster at @fronteirases, @elixiremfoco @emilias_utfpr
Elixir Brasil 2021, the fourth edition of the Elixir Brasil conference, happened in November. For the second time, it was a free online event. All videos are available at https://www.youtube.com/c/ElixirBrasil.
ELUG CE organized several virtual online meetups that were attended by people from all over Brazil
In 2021, the first podcast in Portuguese exclusively dedicated to Elixir and the BEAM was launched. The name of the podcast is “Elixir em Foco” (translation: Elixir in Focus), it has published 9 regular episodes (interviews about Elixir in production) and 6 extra episodes (including an interview with José Valim).
The second edition of the Code BEAM Brasil conference happened in August. For the second time, it was an online event.
Louis Pilfold
My greatest achievement has been to build a friendly and welcoming community around Gleam, especially on the discord server and on GitHub. The people are the most important part of any collaborative project, and a big part of what makes Gleam fun. :)
Miguel Cobá, Author of How to deploy Elixir to production in 5 minutes.
This book was created in 5 weeks, initially as a series of blog posts. It was published on Black Friday week and got seen by 2000 people, it was downloaded 600 times and, although the book was free, 29 people paid for it!
The book has guides to deploy to the main services like DigitalOcean, Fly .io, Render .com and Gigalixir.
Fred Hebert,
Author of Property-Based Testing with PropEr, Erlang, and Elixir.
I’m really eager for EEP-49 to be merged for Erlang, though that will land in stable only in 2022. I’d say for 2021 it would be that the JIT for Erlang finally shipped: https://www.erlang.org/blog/my-otp-24-highlights/#beamasm---the-jit-compiler-for-erlang — it’s been very long-awaited, and it was pretty effective as soon as it shipped.
Robert Aloi, Author of Erlang LS
- 294 files changed, 17430 insertions(+), 5976 deletions(-) in 2021
- 30 people contributed to the project during 2021 only. The project moved from a personal, hobby project, to a community project which is becoming the de-facto standard when it comes to Erlang development.
- In the Microsoft marketplace only, the Erlang LS extension reached the 10K downloads threshold.
- Lot of features implemented, feature requests is still huge (123 open issues as we speak), so it’s going to be an intense 2022!
Erlang LS is a language server providing language features for the Erlang programming language. The server works with Emacs, VSCode, Sublime Text 3, Vim and probably many more text editors.
Steve Bussey, Author of Real-Time Phoenix
I am really impressed with how new voices have emerged in the community this past year. There have been amazing first-time keynotes, speakers, and blog authors. I’m looking forward to the continued growth of the community in the next year!
I am proud to have built a product that’s 100% on Elixir. It’s a lot of work that pulls me away from contributing, but the real-world experience going ground-up with Elixir has been invaluable for me.
Amos King, Elixir Outlaws Podcast
Substantial accomplishments for the Outlaws -
Live podcasts we have done at community events like CodeBEAM America. Getting community involvement and having many voices join us is a nice treat.
Jeffrey Matthias, Co-Author of Testing Elixir
We released Testing Elixir in early August! It’s been a labor or love, with labor being the operative word. 😂
Viacheslav Katsuba wrote blog in Ukrainian. https://dou.ua/forums/topic/35687/ (Sheldon: Erlang spelling library)
I use approach like: first I create topic in English and publish it — then translate it into Ukrainian and publish it. So, I publish different languages in different places
for English — http://medium.com for Ukrainian — DOU
Pablo Costas Sánchez.
The addition of the JIT compiler to Erlang, and the new Erlang forums — Livebook, and NX in the Elixir world — Gleam and other languages of the ecosystem continue to grow!
I am super proud of having worked on PropEr for my Bachelor’s Thesis; now you can run your property-based tests in parallel, check it out! (https://github.com/proper-testing/proper/pull/263)
Besides that, writing a blog post together with Brujo about Galician developers on the BEAM was a fun experience.
Finally, running SpawnFest 2021 together with the rest of the Fellowship of the BEAM (Bryan Paxton, Paulo Ferraz Oliveira, and Filipe Varjão) has been one of the most incredible experiences I have ever had! :)
Did you know besides it being written in English there is also a version in Galician? https://medium.com/erlang-battleground/galicia-%EF%B8%8F-a-beam-12d32908cc92
Carlo, Founder & Digital Artist at @visual_partner
The biggest achievement for Visual Partner-Ship this year was create brigdes to learn through graphic recordings Shooting star of conferences organized by the BEAM communities around the world. 🌎
I hope share more visual instruments to learn Elixir and Erlang next year 🤞
My biggest achievement was to be more involved in the BEAM communities, help with my illustrations, and get inspiration to boots Spanish content for my community. 💡
Brooklin Myers, Host of the #elixirnewbie podcast
I really appreciate Surface UI creating a bridge between Elixir and other languages.
Starting the Elixir Newbie podcast and creating elixirnewbie.com to help newbies adopt Elixir
Alex Koutmos, Author of Build a Weather Station with Elixir and Nerves.
In my opinion, the biggest achievement of 2021 for the Elixir ecosystem are all the advancements that were made with regards to machine learning and numerical computing.
My biggest achievement of 2021 was working on and completing the Nerves book with the Pragmatic Bookshelf: Build a Weather Station with Elixir and Nerves.
The cards are well travelled.
The longest journeys are from UK to such places as Fiji, Brazil, Philippines, South Africa, Japan.
The flashcards quiz https://quiz.elixircards.co.uk/beam_for_fun directed us into selling our stock and concentrating more on online version of the cards.
For community achievement, it’s got to be the JIT compilation in OTP 24. That’s been a stair-step improvement in core performance that benefits everything else on the platform. The folks working on the BEAM itself continue to amaze me.
My personal achievements was contributing Enum.slide/3 to Elixir 1.13.
I’ve been thinking of ways I could contribute to the Elixir standard library for ages, and it was really cool to get something in that I think will help people write more expressive code going forward.
Tracey Pendo
Community Organiser ElixirConfAfrica and ElixirKenya
BEAM Community Achievements:
1. The community has grown tremendously
2. Elixir developers have been able to network world wide
3. There are now more platforn for Elixir developers to get help from .
4. Through the community many job opportunities have been found
5. It has help embrace adversity .Personal achievements:
1 . Given me an opportunity of networking
2. Collaboration with different members of Elixir helps in learning and gaining knowledge of how things are done .
Herminio Torres
Elixir & Phoenix enthusiast, Host of @elixiremfoco podcast
NX (Numerical Elixir) in my option was an amazing gaming change for us and the entire Elixir community, another good own was OTP 24, were able to install and consume package in runtime on IEx, and the livebook took huge advantage of these both
Me, Adolfo, Math, and Cristine lunch a first podcast in a none English language
Mark Ericksen, ThinkingElixir podcast
I think the biggest Erlang/Elixir achievement in 2021 is this:
- Erlang specific: OTP JIT
- Elixir specific: LivebookPersonal achievement:
- Joined Fly.io and helping people deploy their Phoenix apps.
- Continued to grow the ThinkingElixir podcast
David Bernheisel, ThinkingElixir podcast.
Livebook and Burrito
Svilen Gospodinov, Author of “Concurrent Data Processing in Elixir”
The Erlang and Elixir community had many exciting things to celebrate in 2021 — from the release of OTP 24 to the releases of Elixir Nx, Axon, and Livebook, just to name a few. All are amazing achievements without a doubt. However, for me personally, the biggest achievement of the community will always be that it remains welcoming, inclusive, and kind. This something we should be proud of and also never take for granted.
I started working on “Concurrent Data Processing in Elixir” back in November 2019. The world was a different place then, just months before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Despite the personal challenges I had in 2020, I continued working on the book, which was finally released in August this year. This was only possible thanks to the support of the team at “Pragmatic Programmers”, and everyone else who helped me along the way
Dave Lucia
I think the biggest achievement in 2021 of the Elixir community was the commitment to staying connected and bringing in new members in BEAM. Whether it was CodeBEAM, ElixirConf, local meetups, or Twitch streams, we found ways to unite while the world remains quite isolated due the the pandemic.
My biggest personal achievement was participating in 3 different BEAM conferences this year as a speaker. I was on a machine learning panel at Code BEAM that included José Valim, I spoke about our move from Kafka to RabbitMQ at RabbitMQ Summit, and then I spoke about how Surface is a bridge to the JavaScript community at ElixirConf!
Josef Strzibny, Author of Deployment from Scratch
The biggest achievement is that the community continues to grow an innovate on several different fronts from the new LiveView features to Nx, and to Nerves. Personally I was happy for the new JIT and latest IEx improvements.
My achievements in the community are not as big, but I am happy I continued to blog about Elixir.
René Föhring,
Creator of Credo, elixirstatus.com & elixirweekly.net
LiveBook is a game-changer in how we convey Elixir’s advantages to beginners and how we teach the individual advantages of libraries.
Credo allowed me to contribute to this whole “how do we teach Elixir?” topic and being told by people how much Credo helps them as a beginner or as a team lead never fails to bring joy to my day.
This has been a big year for Elixir and the BEAM at Pragmatic Bookshelf! We’ve put out some new releases that really demonstrate the growth of the Elixir and BEAM communities, covering topics like LiveView — the future of Phoenix web apps, and Genetic Algorithms in Elixir — which inspired some of the work that went into the creation of Nx, the new ML framework for Elixir. Check out some of our best sellers like Programming Phoenix LiveView and Build a Binary Clock with Elixir and Nerves and another new Elixir release this year is the excellent Concurrent Data Processing in Elixir by Svilen Gospodov. Stay tuned for even more upcoming releases in our Elixir series in the new year!
Francesco Cesarini, Bringing the compute to the data
The biggest achievement is aligning NX, the JIT compiler and Axion, taking machine learning a step closer to running on edge and sensor networks.
The two biggest achievements are general community growth and the release of Livebook. We are looking forward to doing some interesting cloud infrastructure AI using Livebook later this year.
My greatest achievement this year is building out a great founding team and developing https://massdriver.cloud. Cloud infrastructure is getting harder and harder to manage, and while there are some really great PaaS solutions out there, they tend to limit how much you can grow with them. Its been a joy building the platform on top of Elixir, Phoenix, and Absinthe.
One big achievement apart from above answers is, the implementation of the HTMLEngine in Phoenix LiveView by Marlus Saraiva (https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix_live_view/pull/1440) which is the result of the great work done by the Surface community.
This compilation is done by Sandesh Soni from Songpoem.
I hope you you like the answers. We tried our best. Feedbacks welcome.
This article will be improvised in future as I am expecting a few more answers and I might have made few mistakes while editing the answers.
A special thanks to Brujo Benavides and Erica Sadun(PragProg).
The Takeaways
2021 was an impressive year for the community… we achieved quite a lot of things. Libraries, JIT, Conferences, Books, more Jobs, many companies are adopting BEAM languages in production, more developers learning Erlang and Elixir. Few Beam-related blog posts were published in languages other than English.
Shameless Plug
Are you a Meetup Organiser and looking for speakers, or a speaker and looking to give a talk about the library you built? Do contact me. My company (Songpoem) will help you do the match making.
For 2022, We have this idea.
Receiver pays only the delivery fee and gets a bunch of stickers of BEAM language(s), frameworks, companies adopting BEAM.
If your company is interested in sponsoring, do reach out to us.
