It’s An Evolution: Recreating Life With Elixir Processes & Phoenix LiveView

Speaker: Johnny Winn, Software Engineer @Weedmaps

Elixir/OTP is a powerful combination and what better way to show off that power than by recreating life? What if we could simulate life? What if we could watch the evolution of a million processes at once, with the strong surviving and passing on their traits?

It all starts with a population seed. Each organism (represented by a spawned process) will live, eat, breed, and eventually die. These organisms will live out their simple lives with a handful of modeled behaviors. Whatever happens in one generation affects all the future ones.

These complex worlds can easily unfold with the help of Elixir/OTP. In this talk, we will seed a population and then simulate the evolutionary process, while OTP supervisors, servers, and events are utilized to manage the concurrent life processes. Essentially, we’ll replicate the changing world in an OTP Petri dish. ¡Viva La Evolución!

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We hope to see you then!

6:30 - 7:00pm — 🍕🍺
7:00 - 8:30pm — talks

If you can't attend in person, feel free to join us via live stream on Twitch here: https://www.twitch.tv/wmengineering