This post was adapted from a talk called “String Theory”, which I co-presented with James Edward Gray II at Elixir & Phoenix Conf 2016. My posts on Elixir and Unicode were also part of that talk. It’s been said that “the key to making programs fast is to make them do practically nothing.” Imagine you’re going to write some data to a file, or send a web response to a browser. What’s the minimum amo