What the heck is taking so long?

NOTE: NEW ROOM LOCATION: ACL 16th Floor

This month, John Elm will be presenting on providing user feedback on long running processes.

Your user is staring at a spinner, wondering: Is it working? Did it freeze? Did it fail? Can I leave
this page?
While the system works, the user worries.
That worry is a bad user experience.
Some things just take a while: flight delays, the DMV, big files, waiting for Claude.
We're fine waiting if someone tells us why. The pilot comes on the intercom. The DMV hands
you a number. But in our own apps? We slap a spinner on it and call it a day.
Good apps work. Great apps talk to their users while they work.
So why don't we build them? In other stacks, it's expensive. Workers, queues, Redis, socket
glue. You're reinventing Erlang and paying for it. So you don't.
In Elixir? Trivial.
You'll see a real war story: how the feature one customer called "unusable" transformed into
the one users love most.