John Darrington
Principal Data Engineer, CoBank
John Darrington, recently of the Idaho National Laboratory, has worked in software engineering for over 15 years. He has a wide breadth of experience from fintech to scientific computing. He has led small and multi-organizational teams and has had a recent emphasis in data engineering. He enjoys working with engineers of all levels, helping all grow together in pursuit of excellence in a difficult field. He currently lives in rural Maine with his wife and two children.
Talk:
Failing to Introduce Elixir
We always seem to have talks targeted towards success stories in pushing Elixir - but rarely seem to talk about the failed attempts to adopt it. In this talk I explore Idaho National Lab’s attempt to adopt Elixir and highlight the benefits we saw, the negatives we experienced, and what ultimately killed its adoption. While this sounds negative - it’s a talk that focuses a lot on social frameworks and how groups work together and failures of leadership, not a failure of the language.
Key Takeaways:
- General positives of Elixir’s use in scientific computing and scientific environments
- General methods for adopting new languages/paradigms in existing organizations
- Warts of the language in a collaborative environment and how to overcome them
- How leadership should function in order to make adoption of a new language/paradigm successful
Target Audience:
- This talk should appeal to a broad audience. We talk about technical implementation details for scientific and AI computing, and round out with social structure and leadership aspects of pursuing change in an organization.