Acceptable Upgrades 10 Mar 2025

Last week I had the opportunity to speak at Code BEAM America 2025 in San Francisco. I find Code BEAM to be one of the best conferences for connecting with people in my industry working in Elixir and Erlang—not only socially, but in terms of the cutting edge.

I spoke about introducing tests to an application with an existing and challenging database schema. 25 minutes is challenging when putting together a talk—on the project that inspired this talk, I learned a lot about using Ecto for legacy schemas that just couldn't fit into time. That said, the challenge caused me to distill some code organization rules that I like to use into what the core principles behind them. I believe that applying these rules will result in faster development and fewer bugs, but even if you don't want to apply them directly, perhaps the thinking behind them will be useful to you!

Take a look at the slides below.

Note: This is my first attempt to embed iCloud Keynote into my blog. I was not able to find a way to include the speaker notes, so click through the "Open in Keynote" button to have those available. The deck that I presented used a custom monospaced font for code examples, but for embedding in the web I swapped it out for Courier New.