Nerves Project Meetup Plans

I’m going to be hosting a monthly remote meetup to learn about nerves. We’ll get together at least once per month on a group call to check-in, and keep a slack channel for answering questions and sharing progress.

Why?

I’ve had the itch recently to pick up something new for the sake of learning. In the past I’ve had a lot of fun learning new things with friends. We did a phoenix book club where we got together weekly to discuss the Programming Phoenix book. There was another group of friends that got together for several weeks to discuss the gnat library.

Nerves recently did their 1.0 release so this time around I thought it would be fun to learn some embedded things and do it with Elixir. I’ll be building a replacement sprinkler scheduler/controller which appears to be a pretty simple task. It all comes down triggering some relays when you want to turn on a valve and start watering. This will be a good candidate to work on together. By keeping the core project simple, people can branch off and decide to make their projectd different in some way. Maybe one person will try to add a monitor and a native UI with something like scenic? Someone else might want to add a moisture sensor?

Rough Plans

We’ll keep the group pretty small as far as who is on the call. Video chats with large numbers of people usually don’t go well. But we’ll record the video chats and post them on youtube so people can follow along. People can also lurk in the slack group and follow along there if they are interested (just DM mmmries to get an invite).

I don’t have much free-time recently, so we’ll keep the pace pretty slow and see how it goes. Initially we’ll plan to meet on the first Wednesday of each month at 9pm Mountain Standard Time. The first meeting will be August 1, 2018. Depending on how the group feels the schedule may change.