Luke Westby

I have ADHD and struggle to stay focused on things. This has actually been helpful in learning JS since things change as quickly as my attention does, but it makes it hard to finish things. Elm pushes out distractions so I can focus, and at last the first side-project I’ve ever completed is in Elm!

I’ve lived with ADHD my whole life. There are certainly worse things to live with, but our world is tailored to people who can concentrate – tasks and deadlines drive our working society. I’ve spent most of my illustrious career working with JS, where things change just as quickly as my attention, and it’s been hard to feel a sense of grounding or belonging. Then I found Elm. Even though Elm wasn’t designed for people with ADHD explicitly, it is the best language for those who do to build applications. With Elm, the distractions fall away and I am able to channel more of the craziness that I experience in my head into useful work. In this talk I will share my experiences as such a person with all of you. I hope you’ll come away understanding that using Elm isn’t just good for applications, it’s good for people. If we can keep the developer’s personal experiences in mind when building tools and libraries we will have a more inclusive and accessible community!

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Luke Westby is a cofounder and partner at HumbleSpark in Chicago, IL, USA. He is an active member of the Elm community, helping to maintaining several open source packages including elm-http-builder and elm-lang/core. He loves contributing to the Elm community by speaking about the language, answering questions in the Elm Slack, writing blog posts, and organizing the Chicago Elm Meetup. When he is not thinking about code he likes to play the guitar, speed-run Metroid Fusion, and watch far too much TV with his fiancée.