Ari Schlesinger illuminates a unique path of social responsibility carved through the tech world, using feminism as a guide while bearing attacks, criticism, and contortion. That trail led Ari to ask how programming languages shape society and, eventually, to research Elm—the compiler, error messages, and community.

Thanks to our sponsor, Logistically. Email: [email protected].

Music by Jesse Moore.
Edited by Toni Cañete.

Recording date: 2025.06.06

Guest

• Ari Schlesinger

Show notes

[00:00:25] Sponsored by Logistically

[00:02:27] Introduction (for real)

• University of Georgia
• Socially Responsible Tech Lab
• "A Case for Feminism in Programming Language Design", co-authored with Felienne Hermans
• Addressing Computing's Discrimination Problem: A Framework for Anti-Discriminatory Computing by Ari Schlesinger
• Elm Town 88 – Wonder: Unconscious bias with Felienne Hermans

[00:04:57] Origin story

• FemTechNet
• Alex Juhasz
• Programmed Visions: Software and Memory by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun

[00:14:33] Why Did School Suck?

[00:20:41] A little thing called Y Combinator and 4chan happened

• HASTAC (Cathy Davidson)
• "A Cyborg Manifesto" by Donna Haraway

[00:30:43] Anti-discriminatory framework

• "Good intentions are not enough: how informatics interventions can worsen inequality" by Tiffany C. Veinot, Hannah Mitchell, and Jessica S. Ancker
• Good Inside by Dr. Becky Kennedy

[00:43:00] Language shapes reality

• Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

[00:49:22] Glaciology

• "Glaciers, gender, and science: A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change research" by Mark Carey, M. Jackson, Alessandro Antonello, and Jaclyn Rushing

[00:58:11] Relation of Ari's research to Elm

• Strange Loop
• Papers We Love Conf
• "The Hard Parts of Open Source" by Evan Czaplicki at Strange Loop 2018
• Propaganda by Edward Bernays
• The Last Whole Earth Catalog

[01:04:32] Elm error messages

[01:20:36] Slackbot / Feminism

• bell hooks - Feminism is for Everybody

[01:29:22] Why study Elm?

• "The Economics of Programming Languages" by Evan Czaplicki at Strange Loop 2023

[01:32:14] Contorting yourself

• "When We Have Never Been Human, What Is to Be Done?: Interview with Donna Haraway" by Nicholas Gane in Theory, Culture & Society
• The Good Place
• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)

[01:43:00] Picks

Ari's picks

• Possible: How We Survive (and Thrive) in an Age of Conflict by William Ury
• Frieren: Beyond Journey's End (TV series)
• Programmed Visions: Software and Memory by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
• Feminism Confronts Technology by Judy Wajcman
• TechnoFeminism by Judy Wajcman
• ACM TechBrief: Advancing Accessibility in the Digital World
• PBS / Sesame Street
• Taskmaster
• The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

Jared's picks

• "Queer Theory for Lichens" (archive) by David Griffiths
  • https://jayjinsing.github.io/files/QueerTheoryLichens.pdf (PDF)
• Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake
• The Rehearsal on Max by Nathan Fielder
• Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich

Elm Camp organizers Katja Mordaunt and Tomáš Látal share details about the June 15th-18th, 2026 event in Olomouc, Czech Republic, and extend an open invitation to Elm-curious folks in the broader community. Tickets on sale as of publishing!

Thanks to our sponsor, Logistically. Email: [email protected].

Music by Jesse Moore.
Edited by Toni Cañete.

Recording date: 2026.01.28

Guests

• Katja Mordaunt
• Tomáš Látal

Show notes

[00:00:33] Sponsored by Logistically

[00:00:54] Introducing Katja Mordaunt & Tomáš Látal

• Elm Town 59 – Elm Camp with Katja Mordaunt
• Elm Town 78 – Elm Camp 2024 with Katja Mordaunt and Wolfgang Schuster
• Scrive

[00:06:22] Elm Camp Info

• elm.camp

[00:07:33] The town of Olomouc

• Elm Camp Discord

[00:13:28] The venue: Park Hotel Prachárna

• Hotel Prachárna

[00:19:50] Unconference format

• Elm Town 85 – Wander: Elm Camp 2025

[00:27:16] Intentionally Elm-curious

• Elm Town 81 – Inspired: Bubble Tea with Christian Rocha
• Lambda Days

[00:34:16] The beauty of Elm Camp

[00:39:41] Picks

Katja's pick

• "Teaching Haskell to Kids"

Tomáš' picks

• Coderetreat
• Darknet Diaries
• Kagi Small Web
• "The Small Web is Beautiful" by Ben Hoyt
• Jujutsu

Felienne Hermans relates her journey in programming—writing The Programmer's Brain, uncovering biases within computing culture & herself, and building the multilingual, gradual-syntax programming language Hedy. We even dip into AI (trigger warning) and dumb phones.

Thanks to our sponsor, Logistically. Email: [email protected].

Music by Jesse Moore.
Edited by Toni Cañete.

Recording date: 2025.04.08

Guest

• Felienne Hermans

Show notes

[00:00:26] Sponsored by Logistically

[00:00:48] Introducing Felienne Hermans

• Hedy - Textual programming made easy
• The Programmer's Brain by Felienne Hermans
• "How to teach programming (and other things)?" at Strange Loop 2019
• "A Case for Feminism in Programming Language Design", co-authored with Ari Schlesinger
• Elm Town 59 – Elm Camp with Katja Mordaunt
• Code Reading Club
• The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman

[00:04:09] The costs of misconceptions

• Science Mike

[00:09:51] Journey to computer science

[00:14:33] Programming culture: challenges and creativity

• Elm Town 48 – Making Little Games Like Presents with Martin Stewart
• Elm Town 64 – The network effect with Martin Stewart
• Advent of Code

[00:21:36] Bias and building a multi-lingual programming language

• Mark Guzdial's blog: Computing Ed Research - Guzdial's Take

[00:28:35] Hedy's gradual syntax

• Addressing Computing’s Discrimination Problem: A Framework for Anti-Discriminatory Computing by Ari Schlesinger
• The Will to Change by bell hooks

[00:38:12] Programming language community, learning, and valuing hard things

[00:47:19] How language design choices affect cognitive load

• "The Hard Parts of Open Source" by Evan Czaplicki at Strange Loop 2019
• Elm Town 58 – Unblocking users with quality software with Tessa Kelly
• Episode 68: Elm and ADD with Dillon Kearns and Jeroen Engels

[00:56:22] History of women in computing

• "Female Inventors and Narratives of Innovation in Late Twentieth-Century Computing" by Myra Cheng
• Nathan Ensmenger

[01:03:40] Kotodama (言霊): What's in a name?

• Feeling of Computing 75 • A Case for Feminism in Programming Language Design by Felienne Hermans

[01:08:49] Switching to a dumb phone

[01:16:48] AI

• "An Age of Hyperabundance" by Laura Preston
• In Praise of Messy Lives by Katie Roiphe

[01:30:10] Picks

Felienne's picks

• "An Age of Hyperabundance" by Laura Preston
• Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond by Tamara Kneese
• Crisis of Narration by Byung-Chul Han

Jared's pick

• The End of This Day's Business by Katharine Burdekin

Sophie Collard describes her transition from environmental engineering to software, mob programming to teach functional concepts, and building a startup app with Elm.

Thanks to our sponsor, Logistically. Email: [email protected].

Music by Jesse Moore.

Recording date: 2025.02.24

Guest

• Sophie Collard

Show notes

[00:00:29] Sponsored by Logistically

[00:00:50] Introducing Sophie

• London Air UI using Elm & Leafletjs
• "Lessons learnt from writing 10k LOC in Elm" at Lambda Days 2024
• sophiecollard/jsonpath

[00:01:33] Journey to programming

[00:10:35] Learning Elm

[00:14:30] Questions from Monica McGuigan on learning

[00:17:41] Mob programming

• Mobster by Dillon Kearns
• Zed channels for collaboration

[00:23:47] London Air UI

• Custom elements (Elm Guide chapter)

[00:27:48] Railpackers

• Railpackers
• xkcd: Standards

[00:33:51] The Jackson guitar project (Chushin Gakki)

• Chushin Gakki Jacksons Directory (GitHub)
• elm-pages
• Elm Town

[00:41:41] sophiecollard/jsonpath

[00:44:51] Picks

Sophie's picks

• Elm in Action by Richard Feldman
• Programming Elm by Jeremy Fairbank

Jared's pick

• Future of Coding (a.k.a. Feeling of Comput(er)ing)

Joël Quenneville conveys his growth process—taking notes, creating connections between ideas, and sharing those artifacts.

Thanks to our sponsor, Logistically. Email: [email protected].

Music by Jesse Moore.

Recording date: 2025.01.30

Guest

• Joël Quenneville

Show notes

[00:00:19] Sponsored by Logistically

[00:00:39] Introducing Joël

• Some blog posts by Joël
  • "Structuring Conditionals in a Wizard"
  • "The Mechanics of Maybe"
  • "Problem Solving with Maybe"
• Sample Joël podcast appearances
  • Elm Radio 32 - "Elm's Universal Pattern"
  • Elm Radio 52 - "Category Theory in Elm with Joël Quenneville"
  • SW Unscripted - "Conditional Cardinality with Joël Quenneville"
• Some of Joël's conference talks
  • "Rolling Random Romans" at elm-conf 2016
  • "A Number by Any Other Name" at Elm in the Spring 2019
  • "Inverting a binary tree with 1 line of Elm" from an Elm Online meetup in 2021

[00:01:51] Getting started crafting software

[00:09:37] Discovering Elm

[00:11:50] JSON Decoders, and then...

• Reasoning by Analogy by Joël Quenneville
• Getting Unstuck with Elm JSON Decoders by Joël Quenneville
• Elm’s Universal Pattern by Joël Quenneville

[00:23:57] Inspiration, artifacts, and note-taking

• Learning by helping out in the Elm Slack by Joël Quenneville
• My Note Taking System Gives Me Constant Ideas by Joël Quenneville
• Obsidian
• The Notecard System: The Key For Remembering, Organizing And Using Everything You Read by Ryan Holiday
• Gingko Writer 

[00:39:11] Active versus passive growth

• Turning experience into growth by Joël Quenneville

[00:49:47] Collect mental models and heuristics

• Triangle of Separation by Joël Quenneville
• Elm Town 76 – Between the paving stones with Andrew Lenards
• Andrew's Arboriculture zine No. 001 – Joël's Triangle

[00:54:18] Picks

Joël's pick

• How To Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens

Jared's pick

• Jesse Welles

In a short break from the Wonder series, John Pavlick, Wolfgang Schuster, and Tristan Pendergrass join Jared to report on the Elm Camp 2025 unconference experience in Michigan, USA.

Thanks to our sponsor, Logistically. Email: [email protected].

Music by Jesse Moore.

Recording date: 2025.07.07

Guests

• John Pavlick
• Wolfgang Schuster
• Tristan Pendergrass

Show notes

[00:00:14] Sponsored by Logistically

[00:00:35] Elm Camp sponsors

• NoRedInk
• Concentric

[00:01:09] Introductions

• Tony Bradley @abradley2 (GitHub)
• Tony Bradley's elm-i18next-gen

[00:06:27] Setting the scene

• elm.camp
• Ronora Lodge & Retreat Center

[00:13:15] Unconference format

• Feedback.one

[00:26:48] Sessions

• Elm Town 81 – Inspired: Bubble Tea with Christian Rocha
• Wolfgang's blog series on Elm virtual DOMs
  • Bring Your Own DOM – Part 1 – Portals
  • Bring Your Own DOM – Part 2 – TUIs
• Wolfgang's elm-ink (GitHub) repo
• elm-tooling/elm-language-server initially by Kolja (@razze)
• Elm - Community
• Elmcraft - Community
• Elm Land
• Lamdera
• Simon Lydell's elm-safe-virtual-dom
• React DOM issue - Dan Abramov's link to Chromium issue & hack

[00:52:27] Picks

John's picks

• <| ("left pizza")
• << ("left compose")
• John's jmpavlick/q
• Zokka
• Michigan

Wolfgang's picks

• Summer Games Done Quick
• The Last Phi Hunter
• Richard Feldman's course on Frontend Masters Write a Compiler That Understands Types

Tristan's pick

• Vantage

Jared's picks

• Parks (1st edition)
• Elmcraft.org

Justin Lubin sketches his journey from undergrad research at UChicago with Ravi Chugh on output-directed and bidirectional programming environments (Sketch-n-Sketch) to graduate work at UC Berkeley with Sarah E. Chasins, focusing on programming language theory, researching how statically-typed functional programmers write code, and beyond, to helping domain experts.

Thanks to our sponsor, Logistically. Email: [email protected].

Music by Jesse Moore.

Recording date: 2024.12.09

Guest

• Justin Lubin

Show notes

[00:00:44] Introducing Justin

• Sketch-n-Sketch
• "How statically-typed functional programmers write code" by Justin Lubin and Sarah E. Chasins

[00:07:07] Elm all the way down

[00:08:36] What is Sketch-n-Sketch?

• Hazel

[00:11:03] From Parker Ziegler: Getting started in a large Elm codebase

[00:13:01] The  Sketch-n-Sketch cinematic universe

• Maniposynth

[00:22:21] Research on how  statically-typed functional programmers write code

• Elm Town 83 – Wonder: Meeting people where they are with Ryan Haskell

[00:35:11]  From Parker Ziegler: Ergonomics vs. hindrances

[00:40:25] Fork of the Elm compiler

• ravichugh/sketch-n-sketch (GitHub)

[00:45:04] Cobbler

• "Equivalence by Canonicalization for Synthesis-Backed Refactoring" by Justin Lubin, Jeremy Ferguson, Kevin Ye, Jacob Yim, and Sarah E. Chasins
• Cobbler (GitHub)

[00:47:36] Justin's current work

[00:51:45] Picks

Justin's pick

• Design at Work: Cooperative Design of Computer Systems by Joan Greenbaum and Morten Kyng

Jared's pick

• Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake

Kicking off the Wonder series, Ryan Haskell shares his approach to teaching Elm, his gap year adventures, and his current work at Brilliant. He gives insights into creating accessible learning materials, building games, and finding inspiration outside the Elm ecosystem.

Thanks to our sponsor, Logistically. Email: [email protected].

Music by Jesse Moore.
Edited by Toni Cañete.

Recording date: 2024.11.27

Guest

• Ryan Haskell

Show notes

[00:00:21] Sponsored by Logistically

[00:00:43] Introduction

• ryan.town
• Welcome to Elm! YouTube series
• Elm Town 62 – The Map to Elm Land
• Elm Land
• ryan-haskell/date-format

[00:01:34] Gap Year

[00:03:31] Building a game in Godot

• Turbo Champ

[00:11:01] Welcome to Elm YouTube Series

• Richard Feldman's "Teaching Elm to Beginners" (elm-conf 2017)

[00:17:06] Teaching style

• "Parentheses are like hugs" - from Section 1.5 Advanced Functions

[00:24:52] From Wolfgang: Finding inspiration

• Inspiration for Vendr's elm-gql from watching Ben Awad's videos

[00:29:07] Remaking Ryan's website

[00:32:41] Working at Brilliant

• Brilliant
• Elm Town 57 – Brilliant ways to use Elm with Aaron Strick
• Red Blob Games

[00:39:15] Picks

Ryan's picks

• Dracula by Bram Stoker
• The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
• Vite 6.0
• The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (N64)
• Horizon Zero Dawn
• Satisfactory

Jared's picks

• Satisfactory Night Fever by Dan Bull
• Richard Feldman's "Teaching Elm to Beginners" (elm-conf 2017)
• Frontend Masters Elm courses by Richard Feldman
  • Introduction to Elm, v2
  • Advanced Elm
• Elm in Action by Richard Feldman (Manning)
• Welcome to Elm! YouTube series

In the final episode of the Inspired series, Dillon Kearns and Jeroen Engels wax philosophically with Jared about what it means to be inspired by Elm within the context of tools. We chat about feedback, guarantees, and contracts as lenses for building tools.

Thanks to our sponsor, Logistically. Email: [email protected].

Music by Jesse Moore.
Edited by Toni Cañete.

Recording date: 2024.08.29

Guests

• Jeroen Engels
• Dillon Kearns

Show notes

[00:00:50] Sponsored by Logistically

[00:01:14] Introduction

• Elm Radio
• Elm Town 61 – Turning the pages
• Elm Town 65 – Let's roll with it
• Elm Town 79 – Inspired: Gleam with Hayleigh
• Elm Town 80 – Inspired: Roc with Richard Feldman
• Elm Town 81 – Inspired: Bubble Tea with Christian Rocha

[00:02:20] What does it mean to be inspired by Elm?

[00:05:53] Elm philosophy

• Evan's "Elm philosophy" thread
• elm-review
• elm-pages

[00:25:44] Simplicity is not just for beginners

[00:32:38] What are tools?

[00:33:56] Feedback & guarantees

[00:39:26] Tool as contract (not slicing hot dogs nor fingers)

[00:45:18] Lobbying for tool as contract

• Hayleigh's elm-web-audio

[00:48:09] Tool as an expression of a point of view

• Dillon's elm-graphql

[00:50:37] Roc

• Roc

[00:53:04] Contracts & purity

• Lamdera
• Matthew Griffith's elm-ui

[01:08:09] What's next for Elm?

[01:13:38] Picks

Jeroen's picks

• Elm Camp
• Save the Earth 🌍
• Elm Radio

Dillon's picks

• Be kind ❤
• elm-pages scripts

Jared's picks

• elm-pages scripts spinners Pages.Script.Spinner
• Alex Korban's Elm Catalog

Christian Rocha shares his experience building the TUI framework Bubble Tea based on The Elm Architecture. We talk about Impostor Syndrome, mentors, and how he incorporates his background in design at Charm.

Thanks to our sponsor, Logistically. Email: [email protected].

Music by Jesse Moore.
Edited by Toni Cañete.

Recording date: 2024.10.10

Guest

• Christian Rocha

Show notes

[00:00:23] Sponsored by Logistically

[00:00:41] Introducing Christian

• Charm
• Bubble Tea
• Elm Town 79 – Inspired: Gleam with Hayleigh
• Elm Town 80 – Inspired: Roc with Richard Feldman
• learning elm, so I don't need to use javascript by bashbunni

[00:02:12] Origin story

[00:08:17] Mentor John Weir

[00:10:58] Taking The Elm Architecture to the command line

[00:13:51] John Weir's question

[00:15:48] Bubble Tea related tools

• Glow
• Bubbles
• Lip Gloss
• Gum
• Soft Serve
• Glamour

[00:20:23] Background in design/branding

[00:23:35] What is VHS?

• VHS
• asciinema

[00:26:08] How has the architecture of Bubble Tea held up?

[00:27:35] What are you excited about these days?

• Mitchell Hashimoto's Ghostty
• Roc

[00:32:44] Picks

Christian's picks

• Go Mecha Ball
• "The Great"
• Tampopo
• Brompton

Jared's picks

• Teardown
• Dan Bull
• Glass Animals
• Bicycle Diaries by David Byrne

Elm pioneer Richard Feldman returns to explain why he made Roc, a direct descendant of Elm. He notes a distinct trade-off of choosing not to have persistent data structures. Later, he shares how his experience teaching Elm informed Roc's design. We even learn about the power of platforms.

Thanks to our sponsor, Logistically. Email: [email protected].

Music by Jesse Moore.

Recording date: 2024.05.23

Guest

• Richard Feldman

Show notes

[00:00:20] Non-introduction

• Roc
• Software Unscripted
• "Making Impossible States Impossible"
• "Scaling Elm Apps"
• Elm in Action
• Elm courses on Frontend Masters

[00:01:47] Motivations to make Roc

[00:04:53] Back to the beginnings in 2018

[00:15:25] How Roc compares to Elm

• Aaron VonderHaar's elm-format
• Elm Style Guide
• "Bret Victor style reactive debugging" by Laszlo Pandy at Elm Workshop 2013 (YouTube)
• "Functional Semantics in Imperative Clothing"

[00:25:18] Minimizing the erosion of simplicity (governance models)

• "BDFN" on roc-lang.org
• Episode "Programming and Industrial Design with Greg Wilson" of Software Unscripted

[00:31:36] How teaching Elm informed Roc's design

[00:40:34] Design process

• Episode "The Roc Programming Language with Richard Feldman" of Software Unscripted

[00:45:04] Working at Zed Industries

• Zed

[00:50:28] Platforms

[00:58:03] Picks

Richard's picks

• Performance-Aware Programming Series by Casey Muratori
• Software You Can Love (SYCL) Milan 2024 playlist (YouTube)
• "Hybrid-Level Programming" by Richard Feldman at SYCL Milan 2024 (YouTube)
• Reliqa

Jared's picks

• Umphrey's McGee
• Bret Victor