Looking back at ElixirConf EU 2025 - networking, speaking and Permit

This, along with our showcase booth as Platinum Sponsor of the conference, was a fantastic opportunity to highlight our open source contributions to the Elixir ecosystem.
Looking back at the event and the way we lived it, I'll share my thoughts from a the speaker's point of view, and also briefly touch on the topic of the presentation to give an update on what's being worked on in Permit, including the new Permit.Absinthe integration.

Lisbon to Kraków - attendees to exhibitors

Our participation in ElixirConf EU 2025 was markedly different from the previous one. Last year in Lisbon, we were regular attendees with just a goal to be there and enjoy the talks and networking with the Elixir community.

Then, once it finished, it was announced that Kraków would be next. Almost immediately the idea was like: when's the best occasion to see how it's like having a conference booth, if not when the conference is coming to your home country?

Some months later, this became a quite broad team effort. Dawid designed the booth and all the related gadgets & visuals, I wrote the Elixir Adoption Guide e-book that we printed for handing out at the conference, Szymon made us platinum sponsors of the conference, while Karolina and Mikołaj's efforts helped make people eagerly anticipate our presence.
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We also knew that the whole project wouldn't be complete without us applying for speaker slots, so we brainstormed and several members of our development team submitted their proposals. One of them was accepted, while with others I'm sure they'll resurface in one way or another, perhaps on our blog one day.

Life at the booth

I had my presentation slot on day 2, so we assembled the booth on 'day 0' before it all started, and day 1 was all about networking. Having the booth helped us remain well-visible and meet a lot of people, and the Elixir Adoption Guide e-book turned out to be an instant hit: the 50 physical copies we brought disappeared before noon. We still offered plenty of other gadgets, too, for those who didn't manage to get a copy.

Networking is also markedly different when you're behind your company's booth: it encourages attendees to approach you, which helps a lot if you're not a particularly extrovert person. We spoke with a lot of people, and appreciate everybody of you coming in to say hello - while seeing a number of ever-familiar friendly faces coming to yet another ElixirConf EU was also cool!

Obviously, at an event like this, you want to stay healthy and not get overboard with sweet snacks and caffeine alike - striking the right balance helps stay focused during presentations and witty in small talk.
For me, staying in good shape was particularly important given the next day's presentation, so let's now explore the event from that perspective.

Speaker's impressions

Firstly, I want to thank the ElixirConf EU 2025 organizers for having me join the conference as a speaker. It's my second time speaking at this conference, and I'm grateful to have been given another chance.

Having rather sporadic experience speaking in public either online or offline, and being a rather introverted dude, I must say the speakers' dinner on 'day 0' helped a lot to bring about a feeling of being at home. It was an excellent opportunity to meet some of the best Elixir evangelists and pioneers from all over the world, and I felt that the ice was broken in no time.

Track 2 was where I was due to give my presentation, and - after I used day 1 to do some final finessing in my notes - I was ready to get on stage. There was a bit of stage jitters involved, as I'm still not a frequent speaker used to the thrills of it, but it does get better if you're presenting a topic that you're feeling strongly about.

It's also not easy to predict the running time of your presentation beforehand - even if you do a dry run at home, you most certainly want to take into account unexpected things happening.

For example, I had some issues with displaying slide notes in Keynote before I started speaking, and during the talk the HDMI cable was doing weird stuff and having the slides disappear, which was putting me off my stride. This meant I was a bit short on time and unable to squeeze in a live coding segment, but I had already thought of it as optional and not something I cannot live with, if things like that happen. So, it's good to have a bit of flexibility in mind when planning your presentation when time slots are tight.

Overall, the 40-minute time slot seems to me like a sweet spot between comprehensiveness and brevity and plan for roughly 30 minutes of talk, 5-10 minutes of Q&A and, depending on how the two go, also a bit of safety buffer. To me, as a speaker, the choice between 40-minute and 20-minute slots was welcome, but my personal perspective attending conferences is that I enjoy 40-minute talks way more because they allow to have a deeper dive into the subject without running too long to focus - with shorter ones, especially if the whole event's agenda is centered around these, I feel they're often going shallow and disappointingly lack substance. On the other hand, the ElixirConf EU speakers that chose 20-minute slots knew what they were doing and seemed to have made a conscious choice, and I enjoyed them, too.

So, to wrap up the bit about the talk itself - I'm quite satisfied with what I was able to deliver, and grateful to everyone who joined to listen! It was a good opportunity to bring Permit's development to the spotlight and help it gain traction as a true open-source project. Let's now do a quick recap of what it's about, and what has happened since the conference.

Permit: the open-source Elixir authorization project

My presentation included an introduction to Permit's basics on top of well-known permission management paradigms, followed by explanation of how it integrates with Ecto and Phoenix as well as an Absinthe integration in the works. There's a post on our blog discussing recent updates to Permit, which also touches on things discussed in the presentation.

Then, summing it up, I also talked about future ideas for development of the Permit ecosystem - including wrapping up the Absinthe thing as well as possibly getting it to work with Postgres row-level security and other frameworks such as Commanded. This was then followed up by an article discussing these ideas in more detail.

Since the talk, we've managed to release Permit.Absinthe's first version to Hex, as well as finesse the future development ideas - you can read more about that in our article discussing them in more detail.

We're not only planning to expand Permit's integrations to new frameworks and libraries - one of our main issues for now is finessing the tooling for developer friendliness. We'd like to provide Permit users with a policy playground tool to visually design and analyze authorization rules, also allowing them to inspect Ecto queries generated by Permit.Ecto based on rules defined in your codebase. We're also thinking of creating generators to facilitate Permit's support of commonly used authorization paradigms. Another idea is to create a separate library, let's name it `PermitUI`, drawing influence from commonly used authorization patterns in the web, exposing a Phoenix LiveView-based UI to manage authorization rules at runtime.

On top of this all, there's now a new website for Permit, showcasing the library's purpose and providing useful usage cheatsheets, and much better environment in place for open-source contributions:
- Slack channel
- GitHub Discussions
- Contributing guidelines

So, we want you to feel invited to contribute to all libraries comprising the Permit ecosystem - the more traction it gains as an open-source project, the better it will be at serving developers' needs!