Thinking Elixir Podcast

We talk with Joel Kemp about his experience introducing Elixir at Spotify. We learn about the concurrency problems he had with the default stack and how that was solved with the BEAM. We talk about the inertia that larger companies have that make introducing any change harder. Joel compares the process to running a marathon and shares some tactics used to help build internal support and interest....

After covering the news we catch up on what Elixir things we've been thinking about and working on. Mark brings up using Livebook as a Business Intelligence tool for doing analysis of a running application's data. David brings up how to design safe data migrations in Elixir systems, examples from the Rails ecosystem and how he's thinking about that for Elixir. Show Notes online - http://podcast.th...

We sat down with co-host Cade Ward to hear how he and his team tackled a problem of hosting live web chats with crowds of 120K+ users coming together for live events. On the show, we have talked with a couple guests with similar bursting high-load situations. Cade had been through it too so it was time to dig in and cover how this situation can be solved. We cover the different attempts and tempor...

We talk with Kurt Mackey, founder at Fly.io, about what makes the Fly platform unique and why hosting Elixir applications there makes a lot of sense. They started out looking to make a better CDN for developers and this pushed them to try deploying Full Stack applications closer to users, not just the static assets! We learn about the tech behind the networking, how databases can be moved closer t...

We talk with Philipp Schmieder about his experience creating a LiveView application for a political party’s convention and then watching the app blow up. We learn how he recovered, why it failed, and how he fixed it going forward. We also discuss some other application architecture ideas and how they might work. It’s a great post-mortem discussion where Philipp shares his wisdom so others learn fr...

We talk with Lucas San Román about his library Sourceror and how it was created to solve some AST parsing limitations. The Elixir parser discards code comments, so it can’t be used for re-writing Elixir code when refactoring. IDE’s often include more advanced refactoring tools and the ability to provide that requires a smarter parser. Sourceror keeps the comments while also providing advanced feat...

We talk with Ilya Averyanov about how the SOLID principles, typically associated with OOP, can apply to Elixir. We talk about Ilya's blog post where he applied these principles to his Github project and how that helped in PR discussions. We also talk about testing, architecture, and more. Show Notes online - http://podcast.thinkingelixir.com/53 Elixir Community News https://github.com/phoenixframe...

We take a deeper dive with Nathan Long into IOLists in Elixir. We cover what they are, how they work, the power they have when concatenating strings, and how they are used in Phoenix and Logger. We even talk about improper lists and why they exist. And no, it isn’t a bug. We then talk about PostgreSQL features like materialized views, triggers, and using denormalized tables for solving complicated...

We talk with Alex Loukissas about using Phoenix sockets to provide live auction systems. We comment on the situation of flash-mob-like users coming to a system and needing to handle high traffic volumes for shorter durations. We talk about how the Horde library helps solve fun distributed clustering problems, we cover observability tools, how and why companies should support open source developmen...

We talk with Angelika Tyborska about the history of exercism.io, her involvement, the issues addressed in v2 and what's new and cool in the soon to be released v3. We cover the Elixir track, her work as a maintainer, the journey of a student and how people can help as mentors. We also hear about the "fun" she had creating a maze generator and more! Show Notes online - http://podcast.thinkingelixir...

Maciej Kaszubowski returns to talk about how read models can help modularize our systems. There is a focus on background job systems and how they fit in our modular designs. We cover push vs pull based systems and which is more maintainable. Maciej also shares his approach to learning and understanding a new Elixir library and more! Show Notes online - http://podcast.thinkingelixir.com/49 Elixir C...

We talk with Sheharyar Naseer about Ecto's feature "association defaults" and how they work. We learn how they even support defining a function that gets called during your changeset operations which can be used to ensure multi-tenancy IDs get populated correctly. We learn more about Slab, talk about Single Table Inheritance designs and how we feel about them. We also talk about wrapping the Repo...

We talk with Kamil Skowron about his Youtube channel that walks people through building a crypto-currency trading bot in Elixir. We learn how that led him to start a free online book sharing that content. He covers what people will learn from the process, his goal of helping people see a larger working Elixir system, and his experience writing the book. A fun chat! Show Notes online - http://podca...

We talk with Jonatan Kłosko, the coder behind Livebook, to learn how it works, how the collaborative feature was done, what you can do with it, what you shouldn't do with it, some unusual ways people are using it, and more! We can’t help but talk about all the fun and cool ways it can be abused and how it's finding exciting uses outside of machine learning. A great discussion with lots of insights...

We talk with Michał Buszkiewicz about Junior Developers in the Elixir community. We share tips for Juniors both early in their careers but also more experienced developers coming new to Elixir. We talk about the University vs Bootcamp approaches and what you want to focus on coming from either side. We further discuss how we as employers can support and encourage juniors. A lot of great resources...

We talk with Sasha Fonseca about Elixir's data types behind the scenes. We learn about binary leaks, discuss memory usage, performance considerations, what boxed values are and much more! Show Notes online - http://podcast.thinkingelixir.com/44 Elixir Community News https://twitter.com/sean_moriarity/status/1380124787318665218 – Sean Moriarity released a new library built on NX called Axon https:/...

We talk with Marcin Lewandowski about Membrane Framework. We learn what it is, the project's goals, how people are using it and how it can solve the speed-to-market problem when streaming multimedia. We cover WebRTC, radio, industry challenges, why you want to deploy it to your own infrastructure, why startups fail and much more! Show Notes online - http://podcast.thinkingelixir.com/43 Elixir Comm...

We talk with Velina Petrova about a blog post she wrote showing how a "designer dreamed up" feature was delivered using LiveView and Alpine.js. She shares how she added the LiveView feature to a non-LiveView page demonstrating a great strategy for slowly moving a project in the direction you want to go without stopping to re-write. We also talk about blogging, the value of sharing and putting your...

We talk with Mrinal Wadhwa about Ockam.io, the project and the company. They are taking on the ambitious goal of building an open protocol through Elixir and Rust libraries to enable secure and trusted IoT platforms. We learn about recurring problems that the IoT industry faces and how they are seeking to solve them differently. A very informative and interesting discussion! Show Notes online - ht...

We talk about the mental models we use for writing our Elixir code and for thinking about our Elixir systems (starting at 5:46). We cover transformations, plug, and Mark's "Workshop Model" (starting at 23:45). We also talk about LiveView, (starting at 31:20) how we approach it today, mistakes we've both made and seen. A fun discussion! We want to continue the discussion with you over on ElixirForu...

Wojtek Mach returns and talks about the new Mix.install/2 feature coming in Elixir 1.12. We learn about some other features coming that will help script authors. We talk about OTP 24 and when we can expect 1.12 to be released, ExDocs support for Erlang libraries, and more! Show Notes online - http://podcast.thinkingelixir.com/39 Elixir Community News https://twitter.com/elixirbookclub – New Elixir...

Saša Jurić shares how the team at Very Big Things is building maintainable Elixir code. This ranges from the development processes to code design and organization. He takes some "radical" positions and challenges conventions on a mission to find what actually works well. We talk about his library Boundary and how it helps enforce API designs. He talks about the "Junk Drawer Pattern" and how code a...

After covering the news, we share a live recording of the show from the Lambda Days conference. It was a lot of fun! We covered topics like learning and teaching Elixir, functional programming, strengths of Elixir over Erlang, the developer tooling, why Elixir is awesome even when not building distributed systems, and much more! Show Notes online - http://podcast.thinkingelixir.com/37 Elixir Commu...

Alexandre Minette shares his adventures with LiveView as he builds a personal finance tracking application. We cover his use of hooks to integrate Javascript libraries that give him the UX he wants. He shares some tips and resources for finding Javascript libraries that work well with LiveView. Alex pushes browser locale data up to the server to customize rendering dates and times for a fun and di...

Tyler Young from X-Plane talks with us about how he added a new MMO feature to the popular flight simulator using Elixir. He shares some behind the scenes information on how it was created and how it’s been working in production. We learn about the single modest server that supports all the mobile users right now. I loved hearing how Tyler found working with Elixir to be super productive. He took...