Hi there 👋

I’m Tyler. I like Elixir, functional programming, distributed systems, and soft-real time systems.

I’m building a new take on website monitoring called SleepEasy. I blog about the behind-the-scenes stuff (tech choices, marketing, customer development, and more) at tylerayoung.com.

In the past, I created CBTea, a tiny, privacy-focused cognitive behavioral therapy app.

As part of my work at Felt, I maintain the geo and geo_postgis Elixir libraries.

Here are some of the open source contributions I’m most proud of:

• Enum.slide/3 in Elixir 1.13
• PR to double the performance of simplifying large geometries in simplify_ex
• genserver_architecture, the code that accompanied my ElixirConf 2021 talk
• elixir-raknet, the core of the Elixir-based massive multiplayer server I built for X-Plane
• ultimate-elixir-ci, the distillation of a lot of experience running Elixir in GitHub Actions CI
• Unbound, a Mac photo browser I took over at the start of the pandemic.

Other miscellaneous open source PRs I’ve contributed:

• Phoenix LiveView 1, 2
• Fix for a memory leak in the Bloom filter used in DuckDuckGo’s iOS app (proof that I know what a pointer is 😉)
• whois.ex
• gpx_ex 1, 2
• domainatrex
• geoip
• geo
• open-api-generator

You can find me on Twitter or on Mastodon.

Podcasts I’ve been a guest on

• Thinking Elixir Episode 199: Websockets’ Late Hero and Elixir’s Fresh Updates
• Thinking Elixir Episode 191: Operational Elixir: What’s Supporting the Apps at Felt.com and SleepEasy.app?
• Escape Velocity: Sleeping Easy with Tyler Young
• Elixir Outlaws Episode 127: Kansas City, Here We Come
• Elixir Wizards: Geo Mapping at Felt
• Thinking Elixir Episode 35: X-Plane’s Elixir MMO

Notable blog posts

• Elixir-Lang.org case study: Boostrapping a multiplayer server with Elixir at X-Plane

Conference Talks I’ve given

ElixirConf 2025: Cat and Mouse: Challenges in Adversarial Web Scraping

ElixirConf 2024: More Testing, Fewer Tests

ElixirConf 2024 Lightning Talk: Don't Say the M Word

CodeBEAM America 2024 “Taster”: Elixir as a One-Person Stack for Building a Software Startup

ElixirConf 2023: Rebuilding the Plane While It’s Still Flying, or: Large-Scale, Zero-Downtime Migrations Without Fear

ElixirConf 2022: Delightful Multiplayer Editing with Phoenix

ElixirConf 2021: Architecting GenServers for Testability

Dever Elixir Meetup: Fantastic Hacks and Where to Find Them

An attendee described this talk as “juggling chainsaws for fun.” It’s about a bunch of very nerdy CPU performance hacks available on the BEAM (the Erlang & Elixir virtual machine). Not many of which are recommended for normal use, but many find one or two use cases across a big enough codebase.