Building the Elixir Community

On Monday, December 10th, the TSC Technical Team opened up the Singapore office to host a meetup event for the local Elixir community. Technical meetup groups meet several times a year all over the globe for people with similar technology interest to learn, network, and mentor each other.

As seen in our previous post, we are very passionate about the technology we use. It is natural for us to invest in the community, and to give back by hosting a meetup. In addition to enjoying spending time with fellow developers, we get to learn about new innovations and share our advances and insights.

Wearing custom designed TSC t-shirts we welcomed fellow Elixir developers from the community into our charming shophouse workspace on Bussorah street. The evening began with food and drinks as the sun set over our terrace. The small but growing Elixir community got to know one another, and some of them already started technical discussions about the merits and techniques of Elixir and other languages.

After everyone was fed and had gotten more familiar, we went inside for serious discussions. Chi Ngan, our lead developer, started us off with a talk on innovative methods using Elixir to securely authenticate users and other external entities. Since Elixir is a genuinely stateless system, we need to use different methods than traditional languages.

Outlining the practical aspects, Chi Ngan shared how at TSC, we use JSON Web Tokens to accomplish secure authentication, and gave details on how we ensure complete security. The session sparked many questions, showing that authentication and user security is really at the forefront of attention these days. With weekly data breaches of major companies using traditional systems, security of communication is under scrutiny like never before.

We had a quick break for everyone to digest the information and methodologies, after which we had a in-depth talk on how programming languages in general, and Elixir/Erlang in particular, can be applied to space exploration and satellites. Brian Troutwine, a developer from Dropbox in San Francisco, was up at 4am to video in and present the topic, titled “Piecemeal Into Space: Reliability, Safety and Erlang Principles”.

Elixir is a programming language we at TSC have a lot of faith in, and which offers unique benefits to our applications. We are fully invested in seeing Elixir grow and thrive. We want to share the insights we gain and the applications we develop. This event was a great opportunity for us to continue giving back to the Elixir community and to show off our great office space in Kampong Glam.

‍