ElixirConf US 2026
Overview
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Dates | |
| Training | Sep 4 (virtual) & Sep 9 (in-person) |
| Location | voco Chicago Downtown – Riverwalk, 350 W Wolf Point Plaza, Chicago IL |
| URL | elixirconf.com |
| Organizer | ElixirConf / SmartLogic |
| Format | Two-track hybrid (in-person + virtual); 25- and 40-min slots |
| Framing | Elixir, Phoenix + LiveView, OTP, Nerves, Ash, Nx, AI agents |
| Sponsors | Gold: Oban Pro, Software Mansion, Wye Works, DNSimple, Trifork |
Notes
- Status: LIVE (conference runs today, 2026-09-10).
- Watching remotely (virtual track).
- CFP ran through Apr 12, 2026 via Sessionize.
Keynotes
| Speaker | Role |
|---|---|
| José Valim | Creator of Elixir; Chief Adoption Officer, Dashbit |
| Chris McCord | Creator of Phoenix |
| Zach Daniel | VP Engineering, Remedy; author of the Ash Framework |
| Quinn Wilton | "Collector of dead languages"; security / language work |
Themes
- Phoenix framework and LiveView for real-time UIs
- OTP design principles — GenServer, supervision trees, fault tolerance
- AI agents and LLM tooling on the BEAM (evaluation, agentic workflows)
- Local-first application architecture (Hologram)
- Nerves for embedded / IoT on the BEAM
- Numerical Elixir (Nx) — sharding, numerical computation
- Security — pentesting the package ecosystem (Hex)
Schedule (announced talks)
The program lists 30+ sessions across two tracks. Announced talks:
| Speaker | Talk |
|---|---|
| Francesco Cesarini | Code Archaeology: Tracing 30 Years of OTP from BOS to Elixir |
| Bruce Tate | The Agentic Experience Crisis: How Juniors Become Seniors in 2026 |
| Angeleah Daidone | Runtime Comprehension in Elixir |
| Bart Blast | Local-First Apps in Pure Elixir |
| Chris Bailey & Kathy Keppel | Local-First AI Forge with Phoenix |
| Coby Benveniste | Distributed Load Testing with AMoC |
| De Wet Blomerus | Paying Down Tech Debt with AI |
| Filipe Cabaço | Global Cluster at Supabase |
| Garth Hitchens | LiveComponents |
| Gary Rennie | Terminal UIs |
| George Guimarães | LLM Evaluation in Elixir |
| Jacob Johnson | Calculating the Sky |
| Jonatan Männchen | Pentesting Hex |
| Juan Manuel Azambuja | Phoenix Contexts |
| Matt Milton | Guided Workflows in LiveView |
| Paulo Valente | Sharding and Numerical Elixir |
Training
- Sep 4 (virtual) — Reviewable Code in the Age of Agents: Shipping Code Your Lead Trusts (Bruce Tate)
- Sep 9 (in-person) — Building Local-First Apps with Hologram (Bart Blast)
- Sep 9 (in-person) — Embedded Elixir with Nerves (Alex Koutmos, Frank Hunleth)
Projects referenced
Canonical upstream repositories for the projects behind the announced talks (all confirmed against GitHub, 2026-09-10):
| Project | Repo | Talk / speaker tie |
|---|---|---|
| Elixir | elixir-lang/elixir | José Valim (creator, keynote) |
| Phoenix | phoenixframework/phoenix | Chris McCord (creator, keynote) |
| LiveView | phoenixframework/phoenix_live_view | Matt Milton — Guided Workflows in LiveView |
| Ash Framework | ash-project/ash | Zach Daniel (author, keynote) |
| Nx | elixir-nx/nx | Paulo Valente — Sharding and Numerical Elixir |
| Nerves | nerves-project/nerves | Koutmos & Hunleth — embedded training |
| Hologram | bartblast/hologram | Bart Blast — Local-First Apps in Pure Elixir |
| Oban / Oban Pro | oban-bg/oban (oban.pro) | Gold sponsor |
| AMoC | esl/amoc | Coby Benveniste — Distributed Load Testing |
| Livebook | livebook-dev/livebook | George Guimarães — LLM Evaluation (tie inferred) |
| Bumblebee | elixir-nx/bumblebee | ML models on the BEAM (Nx/LLM cluster) |
| Hex | hexpm/hex | Jonatan Männchen — Pentesting Hex |
The George Guimarães to Livebook binding is inferred from the LLM-evaluation topic, not from a confirmed abstract — treated as an unverified tie.
Background & references
Foundations behind the OTP / fault-tolerance / actor-model thread (anchoring Francesco Cesarini's 30 Years of OTP):
- Armstrong, J. (2003). Making Reliable Distributed Systems in the Presence of Software Errors (PhD thesis, KTH). The "Erlang thesis" — origin of the "let it crash" supervision model. PDF
- Armstrong, J. (2007). A History of Erlang (HOPL III). ACM. doi:10.1145/1238844.1238850 (author mirror: lfe.io/papers)
- Hewitt, Bishop & Steiger (1973). A Universal Modular ACTOR Formalism (IJCAI'73) — the actor model, theoretical ancestor of BEAM processes. PDF
- Agha, G. (1986). Actors: A Model of Concurrent Computation in Distributed Systems. MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-01092-4.
- Cesarini & Vinoski (2016). Designing for Scalability with Erlang/OTP. O'Reilly. (OTP design principles, by the 30 Years of OTP speaker.)
- Ericsson AB. OTP Design Principles — supervision trees, behaviours (primary docs).
Numerical Elixir (anchoring Paulo Valente's Sharding and Numerical Elixir):
- Nx (Numerical Elixir) was created by José Valim & Sean Moriarity (Dashbit); no peer-reviewed paper exists. Primary sources: Dashbit announcement, hexdocs.pm/nx. Sharding shipped in Nx/EXLA v0.11.
- Tavano, Amin & Serra-Seca-Neto (2022). Comparing Neural Network Training Performance Between Elixir and Python. arXiv:2210.13945 — the closest academic source benchmarking Nx/Axon against Python.
Related
- BEAM Summit 2023 NYC – the broader BEAM-ecosystem conference (Erlang, Elixir, Gleam, LFE)
- Event-Driven Architectures & the Actor Model – OTP/BEAM concurrency background
- Lambda Days 2026 – FP across Clojure, Erlang, Haskell, Elixir (see Events index)