I was able to go Strange Loop for the first time this year. I’ve watched a lot of videos of talks from Strange Loop over the last couple years, and was excited to be able to attend this year. It was a great conference with excellent talks on a good variety of topics. I learned a lot and I am really glad I went. The conference was multi-track with up to 8 talks scheduled during each time slot, so there were many talks I missed. Below are my 6 favorite talks from those I attended at the conference. I am sure there are many excellent talks I missed out on, but these were my favorites among the ones I attended.

Last year I created an Erlang cheatsheet. I’ve used Erlang for quite a while, so I knew exactly what I wanted on the cheatsheet. I’ve only been using Elixir for about a year so it took me a while to figure out what I wanted to include on an Elixir cheatsheet. But I settled on some things that aren’t that complicated, but I know I’ve forgotten many times. The resulting cheatsheet includes tables on sigils, escape codes, metaprogramming constructs, pattern matching on lists, maps, and structs, and list comprehension syntax. This cheatsheet isn’t intended for beginners because it does not cover any of the fundamentals of the language. Just like the Erlang cheatsheet this cheatsheet is designed to be printed on a single sheet of 8.5 by 11 inch paper.

The cheatsheet is available for you to freely print or download at https://stratus3d.com/elixir-cheatsheet/. The source code has been released under the MIT license and is available on GitHub at Stratus3D/erlang-cheatsheet.

I’d really like to hear your thoughts on the cheatsheet. Is there something you think my cheatsheet is missing? Is there something that can be simplified or removed?

Let me know via email. If you want to contribute directly feel free to create an issue or pull request on the GitHub repository.

I’ve been a moderately heavy user of social media on and off for several years now. I’ve been hooked on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at different points in time. In recent months I’ve been questioning why I use social media.

Social media is designed to be addictive. Social media sites bombard us with dozens of images, videos, and ads every time we visit them. We’ve become numbed by the constant stimulus. Social media has radically changed how we interact and it has affected society as a whole. I began to question how it has changed me.

I realized that in many ways social media changed social interaction online into a game of sorts for me. The implicit goal in the game was to get likes or shares. I found myself focusing on optimizing my posts for the algorithms, trying to use the right combination of text, photos, and hashtags to generate the most likes and shares. Then I’d constantly check back to see how my latest post was doing. Every time I checked I got a dopamine hit when I saw a new like or share. It had become a game, a game that I was addicted to. I began to question why I participated in the whole thing. Was I really hooked on it? Had I become addicted to the dopamine hit I got from someone liking or sharing one of my posts? Was this the way I want to interact with the world? What was the point of it all?

I realized I didn’t want to live that way.

I wanted more out of social interaction than likes and shares. I wanted lasting relationships, friendships with people who wanted to be more than just Facebook friends, relationships built on shared values and interests, interactions with people who encourage who me to try new things and step out of my comfort zone.

I wanted meaningful, lasting, connections with people.

Social media doesn’t provide that.

Social media isn’t about relationships, it’s about entertainment. A constant bombardment of images, videos, and text designed to entertain us for as long as possible to generate ad revenue. Making meaningful connections with people is not what social media is optimized for.

I realized I had believed the lie that social media was about friendships. In reality social media had inserted itself as the middleman between me and those I cared about. Yes, I have made a few friends online through social media, but most of those friendships were developed outside of social media, many of them in person. I realized there were other lies I had believed that kept me using social media.