Luke Taylor

JediLuke

Staff Software Engineer

Elixir & Agentic AI Specialist

# What I do
[:problems, :opportunities]
|> understand_deeply()
|> solve_elegantly()
|> ship_reliably()
|> document_clearly()
$ cat ~/resume My resume →

Blogs & Talks

1 / 2

Quillex Hits 1.0 – the First Native Elixir Text Editor

ElixirConf US · September 2026

A talk I gave at ElixirConf celebrating Quillex reaching 1.0: a text editor written entirely in Elixir, rendered natively with Scenic. Why build an editor in the BEAM, how I used agentic development techniques like spec-driven development to get there, and where the project goes next.

Watch on YouTube →

Building a Memex in Elixir

Denver Elixir Meetup · December 2021

Exploring Vannevar Bush's original memex concept and my journey to build a TiddlyWiki-inspired personal knowledge system in Elixir. The UI is built with Scenic and will eventually become part of Flamelex, my larger text editor project.

Watch on YouTube →
↳ msg @JediLuke on the Elixir Slack
Luke Taylor

$ whoami

Luke Taylor

Staff Software Engineer · Elixir & Agentic AI Specialist

Coffee aficionado. Text-editor nerd. Doting dad to two hounds.

Perth, Western Australia

jediluke.space

github.com/JediLuke

linkedin.com/in/lukejtaylor

About Me

Engineer since 2013, on the BEAM since Ericsson and never really left. I have run Elixir systems transcribing millions of calls a day, built supply-chain ETL and anomaly detection at PepsiCo, and shipped an in-house agentic assistant on LangChain. Off the clock I build native Elixir developer tools with Scenic.

Lately that means agentic development. I wrote Sexy Spex, an executable-specification framework for Elixir with a Given/When/Then DSL, then used it to drive Quillex to 1.0 spec-first: write the scenario, let the agent make it pass, repeat. The specs double as living documentation that both humans and AI agents can read and run.

Toolkit

Core

  • Elixir
  • OTP
  • Erlang
  • Phoenix
  • LiveView
  • Ecto
  • Scenic
  • Livebook

AI & Agents

  • Agentic workflows
  • Spec-first (BDD)
  • LangChain
  • LLM integration
  • Speech-to-text pipelines
  • Anomaly detection

Also fluent

  • Ruby
  • Python
  • Rust
  • Java
  • React
  • Linux

Data & messaging

  • Postgres
  • Kafka
  • RabbitMQ
  • SQS

Cloud & ops

  • AWS
  • Docker
  • Kubernetes
  • Terraform
  • Prometheus
  • Kibana
  • Jenkins
  • git

Open Source

  • Quillex — the first native Elixir text editor, built on Scenic. Hit 1.0 in 2026. github.com/JediLuke/quillex
  • Sexy Spex — executable Given/When/Then specifications for AI-driven development. Built on ExUnit, with GUI testing for Scenic apps. hex.pm/packages/sexy_spex
  • Scenic — core contributions to the native Elixir GUI framework. github.com/ScenicFramework/scenic

Talks

Career

  • Nov 2022 — Present

    Initiative Lead / Senior Software Engineer

    PepsiCo Beverages

    • Led a team of 3 building a supply-chain optimisation platform that scans inventory for at-risk stock and recommends actions to planners. Measured savings of $1M+ in reduced expired product over two years.
    • Built an in-house agentic assistant on LangChain, used by around 20 supply-chain planners to query and act on that data in plain language.
    • Own the back-end integrations with third-party APIs and the large-scale ETL pipelines the platform runs on, including k-means anomaly detection. Mentor the engineers on the team.

  • Mar 2018 — Nov 2022

    Senior Software Engineer (AI Infrastructure)

    Dubber

    Wrote, maintained and deployed a fleet of 6 Elixir microservices, connected over a RabbitMQ message bus, transcribing millions of phone calls and meetings a day. Multi-cloud deployments with monitoring and uptime support.

  • Mar 2017 — Mar 2018

    Senior Developer

    1Scope

    Built a React web app matching high schoolers with jobs.

  • Jul 2015 — Mar 2017

    Co-founder / Senior Engineer

    SkyGrid

    IoT protocol exchange server and device manager in Erlang, integrating devices with telcos.

  • Nov 2013 — Jul 2015

    RF & Communications Engineer, Graduate Program

    Ericsson

    RF and network design, Erlang and Java software engineering, 4G integration across distributed systems.

  • Summer 2012 — 3 months

    Student Engineer, Summer Placement (Control Systems)

    Rio Tinto

    Three-month student placement in control systems engineering for mining operations.

Education

Curtin University Perth, Western Australia · Graduated 2013

B.S. Computer Science, double major in Electronic Engineering & Communications. High Honors.

Thesis: swarm-intelligence algorithms for autonomous mining vehicles.