Elixir Wizards

In this episode of Elixir Wizards, Charles Suggs and Emma Whamond are joined by Flora Petterson, a self-taught Elixir developer, speaker, and maker, to talk about what happens when software systems forget and how developers can design for recovery.   Flora shares her unconventional path to programming, from puppetry and creative work to discovering Elixir through Nerves and hardware projects....

In this episode, Elixir Wizards Charles Suggs and Emma Whamond are joined by Bruce Tate, founder of Groxio and longtime Elixir educator, to discuss career growth and mentorship in the age of AI. Bruce reflects on Elixir’s evolution and explores how AI coding agents are changing the way developers learn, work, and advance. He explains his “anti-vibe coding” philosophy and recommends practices for m...

In this episode of Elixir Wizards, Charles Suggs and Emma Whamond are joined by Mallory Knodel, executive director and founder of the Social Web Foundation, to talk about internet governance, open standards, and the future of the social web. Mallory shares how her work as an activist, systems administrator, and public interest technologist led her into the organizations and working groups that sha...

In this episode of Elixir Wizards, Charles Suggs and Emma Whamond are joined by Mike Ratliff, co-founder and CTO of GridVar, to talk about the role software plays in the changing energy infrastructure. With over 30 years of experience in technology, Mike shares the path that took him from the early internet and cloud computing into energy and utility software, along with what he has learned about...

In this episode of Elixir Wizards, Charles Suggs and Emma Whamond are joined by Ellyse Cedeno, founder of Heuristic Salvo and a software engineer and product leader with more than 25 years of experience across early internet platforms, gaming, health tech, and distributed systems.   Ellyse shares the winding path that took her from early search engines and Netscape to game development, medica...

In this episode of Elixir Wizards, hosts Charles Suggs and Emma Whamond sit down with Marek Šuppa, creator of the Missing GitHub Status page, a project that reconstructs GitHub's historical uptime data and reveals discrepancies between official status reporting and the platform's actual reliability.   Marek tells us about his dev journey from open source contributor at DuckDuckGo to machine l...

In this episode of Elixir Wizards, hosts Charles Suggs and Emma Whamond sit down with Saša Jurić, Elixir mentor and author of Elixir in Action, to discuss software craftsmanship in the age of AI. As AI coding tools become increasingly capable, Saša argues that the real challenge isn't generating code, it's maintaining quality, clarity, and shared understanding within a codebase.   We explore...

In Elixir Wizards S15E04, Charles Suggs and Emma Whamond are joined by Somtochi Onyekwere, a software engineer at Fly.io and contributor to the Corrosion distributed database project, to talk about distributed systems, infrastructure resilience, and the growing fragility of centralized cloud platforms.   We discuss what recent outages across major providers reveal about modern infrastructure...

In Season 15 episode 3, Charles Suggs sits down with Greg Medland, aka “The Elixir Fixer,” to talk about the current state of hiring and the software jobs market in 2026.   Greg shares what he’s seeing from both sides of the hiring process as an Elixir-focused recruiter, from shifting company expectations to the growing importance of specialization, communication skills, and real-world produc...

In Season 15 episode 2, Elixir Wizards Sundi Myint and Charles Suggs chat with Micah Cooper to talk about distributed systems, data replication, and what it actually looks like to build these ideas in Elixir.   Micah shares his journey from Ruby to Elixir and walks us through Visor, a library he’s building based on the Viewstamps replication algorithm. Inspired by systems like TigerBeetle, Vi...

In the Elixir Wizards season 15 premiere, host Charles Suggs is joined by Holden Oullette, Senior Security Software Engineer at Netflix and maintainer of Sobelow, to talk about how security is evolving in the Elixir ecosystem. We discuss how certain features of the Elixir programming language (like functional patterns and server-side rendering) provide natural immunity against some common vulnerab...

Today, the Elixir Wizards wrap up Season 14 “Enter the Elixirverse.” Dan, Charles, and Sundi look back at some common themes: Elixir plays well with others, bridges easily to access languages and tools, and remains a powerful technology for data flow, concurrency, and developer experience. We revisit the popular topics of the year, from types and tooling to AI orchestration and reproducible dev en...

In this episode of Elixir Wizards, host Sundi Myint chats with SmartLogic engineers and fellow Wizards Dan Ivovich and Charles Suggs about the practical tooling that surrounds Elixir in a consultancy setting. We dig into how standardized dev environments, sensible scaffolding, and clear observability help teams ship quickly across many client projects without turning every app into a snowflake. Jo...

Today, co-founders Kimberly Erni and Pei Pei Wang join the Elixir Wizards to discuss their crochet app, LoopedIn. Recognizing a gap in the market for a more user-friendly and interactive crochet pattern experience, they're building an app that makes following patterns easier and more enjoyable for crocheters of all skill levels. They're building features such as step-by-step guidance, video tutori...

In this episode, Elixir Wizard Charles Suggs sits down with Victor Björklund to map out the landscape of Python integration in Elixir applications. From HTTP APIs and external services to embedded runtimes like ErlPort, PythonX, and the Venomous library, we evaluate each approach’s impact on performance, coupling, and developer experience. Victor draws on real-world examples like Scrapy-based web...

In this episode of Elixir Wizards, Charles Suggs sits down with Chris Grainger, co-founder and CTO of Amplified and creator of the Explorer library. Chris explains how Explorer brings the familiar data-frame workflows of R’s dplyr and Python’s pandas into the Elixir world. We explore (pun intended!) how Explorer integrates with Ecto, Nx, and LiveView to build end-to-end data pipelines without leav...

In this episode of Elixir Wizards, Dan Ivovich and Charles Suggs sit down with Norbert “NobbZ” Melzer to discuss how Nix enables reproducible builds, consistent development environments, and reliable deployments for Elixir projects. Norbert shares his journey from Ruby to Elixir, contrasts Nix with NixOS, and walks us through flakes, nix-shell workflows, sandboxed builds, and rollback capabilities...

Elixir creator José Valim returns to the podcast to unpack the latest developments in Elixir’s set-theoretic type system and how it is slotting into existing code without requiring annotations. We discuss familiar compiler warnings, new warnings based on inferred types, a phased rollout in v1.19/v1.20 that preserves backward compatibility, performance profiling the type checks across large codebas...

Zack Kayser, Staff Software Engineer at cars.com, joins Elixir Wizards Sundi Myint and Charles Suggs to discuss how Cars.com adopted a server-driven UI (SDUI) architecture powered by Elixir and GraphQL to deliver consistent, updatable interfaces across web, iOS, and Android. We explore why SDUI matters for feature velocity, how a mature design system and schema planning make it feasible, and what...

Rustler Core Team Member Sonny Scroggin joins Elixir Wizards Sundi Myint and Charles Suggs. Rustler serves as a bridge to write Native Implemented Functions (NIFs) in Rust that can be called from Elixir code. This combo leverages Rust's performance and memory safety while maintaining Elixir's fault tolerance and concurrency model, creating a powerful solution for CPU-intensive operations within El...

Today on Elixir Wizards, hosts Sundi Myint and Charles Suggs catch up with Sean Moriarity, co-creator of the Nx project and author of Machine Learning in Elixir. Sean reflects on his transition from the military to a civilian job building large language models (LLMs) for software. He explains how the Elixir ML landscape has evolved since the rise of ChatGPT, shifting from building native model imp...

Mark Ericksen, creator of the Elixir LangChain framework, joins the Elixir Wizards to talk about LLM integration in Elixir apps. He explains how LangChain abstracts away the quirks of different AI providers (OpenAI, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini) so you can work with any LLM in one more consistent API. We dig into core features like conversation chaining, tool execution, automatic retries, a...

Connor Rigby joins the Elixir Wizards to talk about Blue Heron BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) support for Elixir apps. Blue Heron implements the BLE specs in pure Elixir, leveraging binary pattern matching and concurrent message processing to handle Bluetooth protocols. Unlike most solutions that require C ports or NIFs, Blue Heron runs entirely in user space, so it works seamlessly in both Nerves-bas...

In the Season 14 premiere, hosts Dan Ivovich and Sundi Myint chat with Isaac Yonemoto, creator of the Zigler library, to explore how Zigler brings Zig’s performance and safety to Elixir through Native Implemented Functions (NIFs). Isaac walks through the core design of Zigler and how it auto-generates the Elixir-to-Zig bridge, enforces type safety, and exposes multiple execution modes (normal, dir...

For the Season 13 finale, Elixir Wizards Dan and Charles are joined by Spin42 Engineers Marc Lainez, Thibault Poncelet, and Loïc Vigneron to discuss their work retrofitting a 2007 VW Polo and creating an Open Vehicle Control System (OVCS). Using Elixir, Nerves, and Raspberry Pis, the team is reimagining vehicle technology to extend the lifespan of older cars and reduce waste—all while making the p...