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.

On Monday, my manager asked about on-call coverage for the Elixir app I work on. There are only a handful of people in the company who know Elixir, and he was concerned that I would feel like I couldn’t take a vacation. Him: How often do you get on-call alerts? Me: shrug Never 😏 Him: Wait, what? Do you have them set up? Do they work? 😰 Me: Yeah, they’re set up, and yes, they work, but the interval…Two weeks ago, another team made a change that affected us without telling us, and that caused an alert.

Last week, Miriam Pena from the Erlang Ecosystem Foundation’s education working group mentioned in the Elixir Slack’s channel for women and other minority genders that Code BEAM V America was coming up. She said the working group had a handful of tickets available for students, folks who can’t otherwise afford to go, and people in groups that are underrepresented in tech. I’ve never applied for a “diversity” ticket to a conference before, but she said they’d pre-purchased them, and the conference was 6 days away.

When I add a new model to the Django app at work, I try to make sure the results in the Django admin have good usability, too. Just because it’ll be mainly developers (and a few project managers) seeing it doesn’t mean I can neglect usability. Consequently, I spend some time on hacking the Django admin. My manager says I’ve been making it do things he didn’t even realize were possible.

Background This message was shared at West Hills Friends Church on 7 June 2020, as protests continued following the killing of George Floyd by police. It was presented over Zoom, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This traveling ministry was undertaken under the care of Baltimore Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends. Scripture A reading from the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 25, verses 31 through 46. “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory.