Ellyse Cedeno
Consultant in Elixir
Paris, France
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Language nerd (Haskell, Rust, Nix, Cobol, 6502 Assembly), retrocomputing and game development. Worked making games at Nickelodeon, medical research at Mount Sinai Icahn School of Medicine, and making internet stuff at Netscape.
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Elixir Beyond Phoenix: Building a Game Server
Is Elixir great for writing games? I'm not too sure about the client side, but for game servers, I think it's a swell choice.
I'm familiar with game servers. I built an MMORPG server at a game platform startup I co-founded (in Java) and ran the tech groups for games at Nickelodeon, including an MMORPG for kids and Neopets.
In this talk, we'll start with a simple single-player roguelike running in LiveView. Then, through a series of code reviews and live merges, we'll turn it into a multiplayer game. You'll get to connect and, who knows, perhaps even defeat the BBEG!
You'll leave understanding why the actor model makes "add more players" straightforward - no promises, no mutexes, just processes talking to each other.
Bring your phone. You're part of the demo.
Ellyse speaks about programming languages, distributed systems, and making complex things tangible. She's based in Paris and can sometimes be found doing real work instead of having fun.
Overcoming my hardware phobia and getting the Nerves
I've always been afraid of hardware, all thumbs, and away from the safe world of programming and mathematics. When I first heard Elixir, my favourite language, worked on embedded systems, I was confused, isn't that for the systems language folks? Emboldened by my recent Elixir Nx experience where I saw how Elixir can work with GPUs, I thought: "This is my time to finally get dirty!" This talk is about what my adventure into Nerves was like, from someone who has Zero experience with hardware and afraid of touching wires. I got myself a RPI Zero 2W and the adventure began.
Softly, Surely: Bringing Elixir to Work
They wanted to get Discord messages imported into the system. This service didn't need to integrate with any of our existing libraries. This was it. I slowly realised: my chance to write this in Elixir! Unfortunately, they didn't love functional programming languages -- they almost didn't hire me because I seemed too "FP". But nothing ventured, nothing gained. I typed out "git push", I clicked Enter. Took a deep breath and hoped I wouldn't get fired.
We've all been forced to adopt the tech stack at the companies we've worked at. Wouldn't it be nice to use Elixir instead? I've been lucky enough to actually work on technology that I found interesting, whether that meant mounting a satellite dish on the top of our building at Netscape to get stock information (yes, the old days!) on our SGI servers or Elixir for games and AI.
Or is it luck? Sometimes the benefit of choice comes with your title and position, or the relationship you have with the decision makers. But sometimes, it's just about finding the right opportunity and approach.
This talk explores the soft strategies I've employed to achieve this -- and how "soft" doesn't always mean easy. Soft can be hard.
Code BEAM Europe 2025 Sessionize Event
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