There's something profoundly different about meeting people in person after hundreds of hours on the phone together. When I finally got to hug Rebecca Le for the first time in Dubai or Zach Daniel in Varberg - people I'd collaborated with countless times but never actually met - it hit me how much of our work lives happen in this strange, disembodied digital space.
Goatmire (and the Ash Summit that followed) brought that space hurtling into reality in the best possible way, and I wanted to share my reflections on the conference.
Goatmire and Nerves Conf ran in Varberg, Sweden from the 10-12th of September, 2025, and was followed up by Ash Summit on the 13th of September.
The People Behind the Pixels
Meeting Zach in person was huge for me. As colleagues and Ash Core team members we've spent many, many hours on the phone together, and we've become very good friends - but there's something different about actually being in the same room.
Barnabas Jovanovics and I don't get much opportunity to spend time together because of time zone differences. He's in Europe and I'm in New Zealand, so our overlap is pretty much non-existent. After meeting him in person though, he's now easily one of my top ten favourite people.
The relationships built that week, new and old - that's the key asset for me. It's the same thing the whole Goatmire conference was about. It’s not just about the talks, it's valuable in ways that never show up in a business case. Anyone who's attended an event like Goatmire knows it matters.
When Your Slides Abandon You at 5am
Official Goatmire Elixir 2025 event photo by Petter Boström
I was invited to speak at NervesConfEU, which preceded the main Elixir conference. My talk, Powering up applications with Reactor is about taking Reactor, which I wrote with one use case in mind (graph-based asynchronous sagas) and finding weird and wonderful ways it can be used. In this case hacking the startup sequence of Nerves apps; running database migrations, provisioning secrets and starting dependencies concurrently rather than one. at. a. time.
Great topic. Good preparation. Everything ready to go.
Except I made the rookie mistake of using unfamiliar software for my slides.
I woke up at 5am on the morning of my talk to do a quick run-through. Half of my speaker notes were missing, the other half were on the wrong slides. Between then and 9am when the doors opened, I hurriedly rewrote basically all of my speaker notes - which for me is the script for the entire talk. I don’t usually need it, but it is a psychological safety net for me if I get flustered. You know what flusters me? Slide malfunctions.
Learn from my mistakes: test your presentation software before the day of your talk, and maybe have a backup in a different format.
Despite the chaos, the talk went well. Panic and coffee can get you a long way!
That evening in the hotel, Frank Hunleth (the creator of Nerves) said to me: "I was really excited by your talk”. I guess I did something right.
The Talks That Stayed With Me
Official Goatmire Elixir 2025 event photo by Petter Boström
My favourite talk was Ellyse Cedeno's Overcoming my hardware phobia and getting the Nerves. She showed how she'd turned a Raspberry Pi into a theremin-inspired instrument without really knowing what she was doing. She took the level of difficulty up a notch by putting a raspberry pi, a rats-nest covered breadboard and some PC speakers on the podium to give a live demo. I found myself drawn along with her into that magical feeling when you suddenly realise that a whole new horizon has opened up. You're like “I can do this stuff now”. Watching Ellyse go through that journey and succeed - that brought joy to my heart.
Marc Lainez's A Nerves Car was absolutely wild. He converted a 2007 VW Polo into a fully driveable EV running on Elixir. Who wakes up one day and thinks, "You know what? I'm going to hack a car"? Okay maybe I do too - but when Marc does it apparently he succeeds!
Saša Jurić's Tell me a Story got a standing ovation. The first of two at the conference - who would have thought you'd get standing ovations at a tech conference? But that's exactly why it mattered. It reminded us that what we do isn't just about the code - it's about the stories we tell each other about the code, about the problems we're solving, about why any of this matters.
The second standing ovation went to Flora Petterson, who delivered an Elixir talk with shadow puppets while her husband played on a baby grand piano. It was out there, beautiful, and completely captivating in a way that pure technical content could never be.
Flora’s talk wasn’t recorded, but the others were, so if you get a chance to watch them, do.
A Conference with Heart
The overall conference was less technical than I expected, but that turned out to be exactly what I needed. The organising committee received over 60 submissions and ended up with 24 talks. The guidance to speakers was deliberate: they didn't just want people giving technical change logs of what they were working on. They wanted people to be exciting, be different, be weird. It was billed as a bit of a weird conference, a dark conference. When you went in, you knew it was going to be different. I remain deeply grateful to have been chosen to share the stage with my fellow speakers.
I had a small cameo role in Zach’s A Letter From Ourselves alongside Barnabas, Rebecca and Josh Price. Despite some technical difficulties (a theme of the conference), it was genuinely enjoyable. Being able to experience most of the conference as an attendee rather than constantly worrying about my own talk was a gift.
There's so much technical content available. It's easy to get technical content. What you can't get from a blog post or documentation is that inspiration, that motivation, that sense of being part of something bigger.
Lars and the Labour of Love
Official Goatmire Elixir 2025 event photo by Petter Boström
I need to give credit to Lars Wikman, the organiser of Goatmire. The man is a gem. He and his family sacrificed their summer holiday to ensure things went smoothly. Everything from speaker hotel bookings to the food was thoughtfully arranged. Lars is vegan, and he even snuck in a fully vegan diet throughout the whole conference. I didn't hear a single person complain. The food was amazing - including the Swedish meatballs. If he hadn’t told us, we wouldn't have known.
That kind of care doesn't happen by accident. It happens because someone decides that making people feel welcome and cared for is worth the effort. Lars made that choice, and it showed in every detail.
Check out his report as an organiser.
Coming Home
I flew home from Sweden rejuvenated and inspired by the community. Not because I learned a dozen new technical tricks (though I did pick up a few), but because I was reminded why I love this work and the people who do it.
I shipped more Reactor features and bug fixes in the last two weeks than I had in the previous six months. A lot of that came from sitting and chatting with Zach, Josh and other core team members about things we should just do - turns out some of them weren’t even that hard. Others came from random conversations with people who came up to me wanting to talk about their use cases. I'd think "we can do that too, and I can actually get it done really fast”.
Whether it's helping disadvantaged communities, teaching kids to make software and music at the same time or enabling new and novel businesses: we’re building things that matter. More than that, we're creating a community that values curiosity, courage and kindness alongside technical excellence.
That's worth waking up at 5am for. Even if your slides have vanished.
Read Rebecca Le’s reflections on Ash Summit, which was the day after Goatmire here.
