Thanks to everyone who came out to St. Louis for elm-conf. It was wonderful seeing you all, and I hope to see you again next year! We don’t have dates yet, but I’ll share here as soon as we do and our CFP will begin in early 2019.
In the meantime, it would help a whole lot if you could share the talks you found especially compelling or interesting with your friends and contacts on social media. It really helps get the word out about Elm, and is incredibly gratifying for the speakers to see their talks shared.
I found Richard Feldman’s talk really good, and I’m only partly saying that because what he describes is exactly the technique I stumbled upon by accident in my current project.
Although Richard probably also deserves credit for that, because the main reason I ended up with Dicts-as-database-tables is that it seemed to follow logically from a couple of tips from his previous talks: make impossible states impossible, and avoid deeply nested data structures wherever possible.
I was actually nervous that halfway through the talk he would say “only joking - don’t do this, it’s a terrible idea”, and then propose something completely different.
Ok, now that they’re published I can say what I’ve been absolutely DYING TO SAY:
Elm-UI’s testing of visual elements is a game changer. I pitched that to a client and they were blown away. It’s gone from them considering using Elm to it has to be Elm UI. Everyone should watch Matt’s talk.
There is another interesting (I would say more challenging) talk of Sam Rowe called “Complex Animations Done Well” which tries to introduce complexity into the elm architecture, i.e. multiple states management: true state, current visual state, target visual state instead of just one single state.
This is promising and I wish the community will one day tackle these problems and succeed. Kind of vuejs philosophy to fit small AND big (= complex) projects ( The Progressive JavaScript Framework ).
If you are reading Sam:
Could you make a repo on your github demonstrating the spring and exit animation examples using this states management?
Do you plan to publish a package?
Hi, I’m glad to hear you found the talk interesting!
I definitely do want to put out an example repo and potentially a package as well at some point but probably not for a while as I need to find the time to do it and I feel it’s the sort of thing that’s better to do well than do quickly. I’ll post it on discourse or slack when I do though and I’d also definitely be interested to hear people experiences implementing either the approach I outline or completely different ones. Given that pure functional programming is still pretty new and uncommon on the web I feel there’s a lot of room for experimentation!
I’m excited to see how you, and others, push the story of animation further within Elm.
Enjoyed every other talk I’ve watched so far as well: Feldman on modeling relational data with dicts; Matthew on elm-ui and it’s evolution from style-elements; Dillon on leveraging libraries which use code generation to provide type guarantees while interacting with GraphQL or ports.
PS - @dillonkearns - thought you might find this code generation project interesting. Helping provide compile time guarantees while interacting with Ethereum smart contracts.
