IEx's Hidden Superpowers

Speaker:
Brett Beatty


Abstract:

IEx, Elixir’s interactive shell, is a powerful tool hiding in plain sight. Even after years of daily use, I keep uncovering features that make development faster, debugging smoother, and exploration more fun.

In this talk, you’ll learn how to level up your IEx workflow—from improving multi-line history and input, to building your own helper functions, to recovering gracefully from half-baked commands, to making your .iex.exs available to remote shells. Even if you’ve been using IEx for a while, you’ll walk away with practical techniques and lesser-known features that can help you get even more out of your day-to-day Elixir development.

Key Takeaways:

  • I would want the audience to come away excited to use IEx and more comfortable using it for a wider range of tasks where they might otherwise reach for another tool.

Target Audience:

  • I’ll try to introduce things well enough for a beginner-leaning audience, but I would tend to mainly target folks that are familiar with IEx and use it regularly but may be unfamiliar with everything it’s capable of.

Level: Intermediate

Tags: iex-power-user