About Me

Howdy! My name is Devon, and I write code. Most of the time when I’m writing code people pay me to do it, but sometimes I write code just for fun! I’m the creator of a mutation testing library for Elixir applications called Muzak, and I'm also one of the maintainers of Benchee and of the Elixir track on exercism.io. I also like contributing to Elixir and Credo. If you hadn’t guessed, open source is pretty important to me. You can see all my open source stuff on my GitHub profile.

I also do other things for fun, like spending time with my family, playing chess, and studying German. Well, to be honest, studying German isn’t really for fun, but mostly because I live in Germany, and speaking German is a really useful skill to have when you live in Germany. I’ve lived in Berlin since 2015, and before that I lived in California and New York (although never at the same time).

Occasionally I also get up in front of people to talk about things that are interesting to me. Here’s a partial list of some of the talks and workshops I’ve given:

• Getting Started with Mutation Testing in Elixir using Muzak - Virtual BEAM Meetup 2020
• Elixir Testing - From Zero to Hero - ElixirConfEU 2020
• Embedded Application Development (for Web Developers) - GOTO Berlin 2019
• Comparing common concurrency patterns in Elixir and Erlang - Code BEAM Lite Berlin 2019 and LambdaDays 2020
• Inside memory management on the BEAM - Code BEAM Lite Munich 2018
• Digging through the garbage - Code BEAM Lite Berlin 2018
• It’s a Small World - LambdaDays 2018
• Functions in Ruby - Ruby Dev Summit 2017
• Refactoring Elixir: Lessons Learned From A Year on Exercism.io - ElixirConf.eu 2017
• Make Your Life Easier with Shell Scripting and UNIX Tools - RailsConf 2017
• The Fun in Functional - RubyDay 2016
• The Beginner’s Guide to Open Source - Newbie Remote Conf 2016
• The “New” Attributes API in Rails 5 - Fog City Ruby 2016

If you want to hear me talk about things on the internet, I’ve also been on a couple podcasts. You can check those out here:

• Elixir Wizards (October 1, 2020)
• Elixir Mix 94
• Elixir Wizards (March 12, 2020)
• Elixir Talk 137
• Elixir Mix 30
• Elixir Mix 18

Want to get in touch with me? I’d love that! The best way to reach me is on twitter at @devoncestes, and I occasionally respond to emails at devon.c.estes AT gmail DOT com.