Elixir Wizards

As users increasingly demand interactivity from their web experiences, Phoenix LiveView is becoming the dominant way of writing interactive Elixir applications without a loss to reliability. Today we welcome back an old friend of the show and GitHub engineer Sophie DeBenedetto to talk about her upcoming book, Programming Phoenix LiveView. We open our conversation with Sophie by hearing about her w...

With the prevalence of at-home learning, teachers have to compete for student attention against numerous screen-based activities. Today we speak with engineering lead Shaun Robinson and Elixir developer Toran Billups about how Legends of Learning helps educators make their classrooms fun, engaging, and productive through their curriculum-based games. After chatting about Legends’ mission to empowe...

ClusterTruck, a master of vertical integration, is rewriting the method of end-to-end food delivery and ghost kitchens. Today we speak with ClusterTruck Product VP Brian Howenstein to find out more about his journey in programming, ClusterTruck as an end-to-end food service, and how Elixir became mission-critical to the success of the business. We kick things off by hearing more on Brian’s childho...

Building a successful development company requires having a leader with technical know-how and excellent management skills. Today we speak with SmartLogic President and Founder Yair Flicker about his company’s origin story, evolution, and their Elixir adoption process. Early in the episode, we talk about Yair’s first jobs before diving into how he founded SmartLogic. An important transition point,...

Despite its welcoming character, the Elixir community struggles with diversity; as the 2020 ElixirConf community survey shows, only 2% of Elixirists are women. Today we speak with Blinker software engineer Alexandra Chakeres about her experience of the community, as well as what we can do to make it more inclusive. We open by exploring Alexandra’s background and coding career. After expressing her...

In this episode we continue our conversation about adopting Elixir, this time with Matt Nowack and Jake Heinz from Discord, hearing them get into the features of Elixir that make it a great fit for building a real-time chat infrastructure system! We also invite Arthi Radhakrishnan from community.com for our mini-interview in the last chunk of the episode. Our chat begins with Jake and Matt telling...

Welcome back to the Elixir Wizards podcast! In this episode, we will be continuing our conversation on the theme of adopting elixir, and our great guest for today is Jason Axelson! Jason is a back-end developer for a mixed reality studio called Animal Repair Shop and has also made some significant contributions to the Elixir Language Server project. We kick off our conversation with Jason hearing...

Anyone who has written software for the travel industry can tell you that it is in desperate need of innovation — shockingly many of their cobwebbed systems were built in the 70s. Today we speak with Duffel CEO Steve Domin, who is building tech that can finally align travel with the expectations of modern consumers. We open by exploring Steve’s journey into coding before diving into how Duffel is...

To beat out their competitors, startups need to code quickly, simply, and in a language that attracts top engineers. Enter Elixir. Today we speak with Shawn Vo, Axle Payments Co-Founder and CTO, about his journey with Elixir and how it has given his company a competitive advantage. We open our conversation by exploring how Shawn got into coding while automating his work as an investment banker. Af...

Today we sit down with Erlanger Viktória Fördős, who talks with us about Erlang and how it is used at Cisco. We open the show by finding out about Viki’s background in coding and her unorthodox entry into the field. After hearing about her experiences in her school choir and her transition into the informatics faculty, Viki talks to us about her first experiences in coding and the thrills she foun...

Today’s guest is Simon Glenn-Gregg, News Engineer at The Washington Post. He joins us to talk about using Elixir to build a prototype for a platform the news house recently implemented to visualize the results of the November 2020 elections in real-time. While the job title of ‘News Engineer’ makes it seem like Simon invents news, this is not the case. He is focused on software related to publishi...

The culture of your programming community directly impacts your professional success. As Thunderbolt Labs Founder Randall Thomas explains in this episode, a community that practices openness and which warmly welcomes its newer members leads to greater career happiness. We open our chat with Randall by exploring his start in coding and how he discovered Elixir. He shares some of the teething proble...

Welcome back to Elixir Wizards, season five, episode one! The theme for this season is ‘Adopting Elixir’, and for today’s show the team at Elixir Outlaws play host! Chris Keathley, Amos King, and Anna Neyzberg give the Elixir Wizards a chance to talk about what they love about Elixir, how they learned it, and some of their experiences using it at SmartLogic! We kick off the conversation with some...

To close off this season and conclude our deep dive into system and application architecture, today’s episode is a special panel discussion on a topic that has provoked a mix of answers that range from the controversial to the philosophical — “What does domain-driven design mean to you?” For the final word on this subject, we welcome back software developers Chris Keathley, Japa Swadia, Mark Windh...

Even with the most programming experience in the world, coding still involves a lot of trial and error. People getting started in the industry should not become bogged down by failure. Because in the end, it’s a feature and not a bug. That’s one of Zillion developer Anna Sherman’s key messages this episode. We open our discussion with Anna by talking about living in Chattanooga, AKA, Gig City. She...

There is no difference between architecture and design. It's all engineering and creating a distinction between the two is a way for someone to get paid more and have a different title. That hot take comes from Devon Estes, today’s guest, who provides a novel way of seeing design and architecture. We open the episode by diving straight into the topic of design, with Devon exploring how good design...

Imagine being hired into a rocketship startup using Elixir as its primary language. And all this, straight out of college. Today, we speak with systems software engineer, Lizzie Paquette who works at Brex, the aforementioned rocketship. We start our conversation by talking about how Lizzie got into coding relatively late in her life, partly due to an ill-fated run-in with Java. She shares details...

Building a sophisticated AI that can evolve to fit our vast and diverse needs is a Herculean challenge. Today we speak with senior engineer Eric Steen about Automata, his experimental Elixir project that uses neuroevolution and cutting edge theory to create a multi-agent behavior tree — or really good AI in the common tongue. But before we tap into that rich topic, we talk with Eric about tech bur...

According to an ancient myth, the world rests on the back of a turtle. And what does that turtle stand on? Another turtle. It turns out that it’s turtles all the way down. Miki Rezentes, today’s guest, believes that all software rests on the back of APIs. Similar to the myth, it’s APIs all the way down. We open our conversation by discussing how homeschooling her children did more to prepare Miki...

With ElixirConf 2020 just around the corner, today’s episode is a sneak peek where we talk with six of this year’s speakers. Each speaker gives listeners an elevator pitch of their talk while throwing in extra details about who their talk is aimed at, what they learned through the process, and which talks they’re excited about attending. Our first guest is Quinn Wilton, a developer at Tinfoil Secu...

Domain-driven design and extreme programming can help bridge the gap between development and business, and today we invite Mark Windholtz from Agile DNA to talk about how! Mark starts out by telling us about his early work in extreme programming before agile was a term and how he switched from Rails to Elixir after realizing its power for implementing domain-driven design. We take a deep dive with...

Welcome to the second part of our special Elixir Wizards Dojo. A mashup made in partnership with ElixirConf Japan. In today’s episode, we talk to Nerves core team members Todd Resudek and Connor Rigby about all things Nerves. But first, Todd leads us into a delightful digression about his enjoyment of heavy metal music. From metal back to Nerves, Todd chats about how he uses Nerves to monitor his...

Welcome to the first part of our extra special Elixir Wizards Dojo. A mashup made in partnership with ElixirConf Japan, in today’s episode, we pose questions asked by the Japanese Nerves community to Nerves core team members, Frank Hunleth and Justin Schneck. After introducing our guests, we talk about which companies make use of Nerve and explore its use cases by looking at FarmBot, an open sourc...

In today’s episode, we chat about system architecture, Ruby, Elixir, and everything in between with Greg Mefford, the senior back-end engineer for the Bleacher Report. We open the conversation by asking Greg about his start in coding, leading to a story about how Greg was that bored kid pressuring a math teacher to teach him QBasic. He shares how he fell in love with Ruby before discovering Elixir...

Johanna Larsson is a community-minded software engineer whose project, Hex Diff, generates highlighted git diffs, right in your browser. In this episode, we talk to Johanna about how Hex Diff can benefit Elixir users, the differences between code architecture and code design, and the debatably under-appreciated role of Elixir umbrella apps. We start the conversation by chatting with Johanna about...