Micropatterns: Learning to Reach Quickly for the Right Tool // Cameron Price

Cameron Price - @cameronp
A lot of experienced programmers from non-functional backgrounds struggle when switching to languages like Elixir because the tools that have served them well for years have suddenly become useless in a world without object hierarchies or mutable state. This is expected. Musicians practice their scales, athletes drill basic movements, and chefs practice their knifework. We programmers are not exempt from the need to hone our fundamentals.
We will look at several little patterns that are common in Elixir and take advantage of important Elixir features, such as pattern matching, first class functions, and tail recursion. We'll see how these patterns can be quickly and instinctively deployed to solve real-world problems, along with tips on how to learn the patterns quickly and keep your skills sharp. Some examples include:
Quick and dirty file parsing using pattern matching
Breaking down big problems into small mutations
Recursing using an accumulator
Writing reducer functions using Enum.reduce_while and Stream.unfold
Pipelines (the one pattern everyone in the room already knows and loves and tries to apply everywhere)
Happy path programming, in which we extract all the error handling into separate function heads, or let it crash
empex.co/speake...
EmpEx, the Empire City Elixir Conference, is a new conference for the Elixir programming language and ecosystem held in New York City. EmpEx 2016 was held on May 21, 2016.

[@starmountpictures]

Great talk. Struggling with recursion - helpful examples. Nice speaking style.

[@createprince2093]

Super interesting from the perspective of someone with no experience in Elixir but who's looking to get into it in the future. Cameron's also quite easy to listen to even outside the content of the presentation. Thanks for such a wonderful presentation :D

[@joshuacochran727]

Really enjoyed this presentation.