Thomas Millar

Independent ML Engineer

Thomas spent 10 years building the Data & Machine Learning platform at Stitch Fix. Supporting 150 data scientists deploying hundreds of ML Models automating every aspect of the business. He discovered Elixir in his researcher to solve many of the problems Stitch Fix was facing with deploying ML in production.

Talk:
I'm New To Your Language, And I'm Here To Abuse It

I love Python. Every language feature is a protocol you can override. This makes for one of the most hackable languages out there. Elixir on the other hand is relatively, extremely constrained. No state, no while loops, etc. And yet, it’s more hackable.

In this cursed talk, I’ll walk you through how two diametrically opposite programming language theories can yield such hackable languages and how I abuse Elixir to be more productive.

TALK OBJECTIVE:

  • The talk is designed to be light hearted, yet break all the rules. To show people what’s possible, not necessarily what’s right. To help open their minds to potentially create amazing tools.

TARGET AUDIENCE:

  • Senior Engineers with a hacker mindset.