Periodically, we see conversations on here with people asking how we can better promote Elixir. I never really thought about it until this weekend, but we need to give Elixir talks at non-Elixir venues.

A lot of the early Elixir adoption has come from Ruby world and probably a big part of that is Elixir having so many promotional opportunities at RailsConf itself. I still remember Chris McCord giving an 8 hour Elixir session at RailsConf in Chicago (that I passed on because, who needs another language, right?).

In Greenville, SC where I live, a local Python/Go dev put together the first Carolina Code Conference this past Saturday. It was intended to be a local polyglot conference and was promoted among all of the local developer groups. The conference was free, fully covered by sponsors and it had about 100 attendees. Not bad for a conference assembled entirely in 3 months. Next year it will be bigger and more organized.

I submitted an updated version of an Elixir talk I gave 2 years ago to the Elixir group in Greenville. People seemed to love it. I had several people tell me how much they liked the talk, that they wanted to hear more, that they were going to go home and try out Elixir, etc. I even had one person send me a nice note that he was not looking forward to the talk at all because of the subject matter, but ended up “delighted”.

I think the big lesson to take from this is something that all of us probably already know. Elixir sells itself…you just have to really get it in front of people. There are tons of Elixir conferences going on, but if we want to better promote it, I think it would go a long way to simply “spread the word” when more general conference opportunities come along.

Here’s the updated talk in case anybody is curious. I ended up getting played off stage because I tried to cram 67 slides into 45 minutes.