Last month, I spoke at the first-ever Elixir Wizards Conference. It was a lightning talk walking through a refactor I did before the 2020 US Presidential Election, titled “Dealing With a Monster Ecto Query.”

I work for a news company, so the presidential election is a huge deal; we can’t have downtime. I knew which query was our bottleneck, so I optimized it right before the election. This took advantage of a few Elixir features, like atoms, the pin operator, and concurrency primitives.

Quakers were heavily involved in the forced-assimilation of Native Americans.

Today, through the Friends Committee on National Legislation (the Quaker lobbyist), we advocate for Native rights and Native sovereignty. FCNL employs Portia Kay^nthos Skenandore-Wheelock, a member of the Oneida Nation to run its Native American Congressional Advocacy Program. It was previously run by Kerri Colfer of the Tlingit Nation, and before that Lacina Tangnaqudo Onco of the Shinnecock & Kiowa Nations.

Trying to find Quakers near you? Try one of these links:

General

• Australia
• Canada
• Quaker Maps: Canada, UK, US
• United Kingdom
• United States
• Worldwide

Note that the “worldwide” link also includes a way to register yourself as an “isolated Friend” if there’s no meeting near you. With time, new meetings can form.

LGBTQ+

If you are concerned about LGBTQ+ affirmation, here are lists of meetings that have formally stated their affirming position.

Just leaving this here as a reference.

Books

• Your local Faith & Practice
• Advices & Queries
• A Quaker Book of Wisdom
• An Introduction to Quakerism
• Living the Quaker Way
• Our Life is Love
• Pendle Hill pamphlets
• Why Friends are Friends
• The Cambridge Companion to Quakerism
• Fit for Freedom, Not for Friendship
• Face to Face: Early Quaker Encounters with the Bible
• A Long Road: How Quakers Made Sense of God and the Bible
• Barclay’s Apology original or modern English

Online

• Friends Journal
• Quaker Speak
• Quakers on Reddit
• Quakers on Discord
• Quakers on Twitter
• My podcast

North American Quakers’ history with racism is often whitewashed. Here are some links for a fuller picture.

• Slavery in the Quaker World
• Quaker Indian Boarding Schools
• Fit for Freedom, Not for Friendship

Elixir has a lot of ways to get the first thing in a list. One of the first things you learn from the basic syntax guide on the Elixir website is that hd(foo) gets the first thing in a list, and tl(foo) gets the rest. You also learn [ head | tail ] = foo.

But what happens when it’s an empty list?

iex(1)> foo = []
[]
iex(2)> hd(foo)
** (ArgumentError) argument error
    :erlang.hd([])
iex(3)> tl(foo)
** (ArgumentError) argument error
    :erlang.tl([])

Those first bits of syntax you learned will throw errors if given empty lists. That means you need to only use them after confirming the list has stuff in it, such as with a conditional or by pattern-matching.