Elm in production by Richard Feldman

Elm is a functional programming language that compiles to performant JavaScript. At NoRedInk it is the primary technology we use to build our Web application's user interface, which students around the world use to answer millions of questions per day. Since we began using Elm in 2015, our production Elm code has yet to cause a single runtime exception. Our error logs show plenty of crashes from our legacy JavaScript code, but none from our Elm code. We've also found our Elm-powered front-end substantially easier to scale than our previous React code base. In this talk, attendees will gain an understanding of how the Elm programming language works, what differentiates it from the other front-end technologies on the market, and practical advice for introducing it to an existing JavaScript code base. The talk will contextualize all this in an experience report of shipping production Elm code for two years, including how it has impacted our team's velocity, technical debt, and hiring. Attendees are assumed to be comfortable with JavaScript, but no other knowledge is needed. Come see how nice your front-end programming experience can become! Richard Feldman is the author of “Elm in Action” from Manning Publications, and the instructor for the Frontend Masters 2-Day Elm Workshop. When he’s not writing about Elm, teaching Elm, speaking about Elm, or co-hosting the San Francisco Elm meetup, he likes to take a break from his job of writing Elm code full-time as an engineer at NoRedInk by kicking back and working on some of his open-source Elm projects. Some have said he’s “into Elm,” but he’s not sure where they got that wild idea.