Thinking Elixir Podcast

José Valim visits and finally publicly reveals what Project Nx is! He and others have been working on it for 3 months and he's finally ready to unveil it. José will speak more about it at the LambdaDays conference, demonstrating it with code and announcing the release and availability of the OpenSource code. Nx stands for "Numerical Elixir". The Nx project brings a unique numerical mode to Elixir...

We talk with Allen Wyma about a Postgres PubSub feature and how it plays nice with Elixir. We dispel the idea that you should always use Phoenix PubSub just because it's there and we cover the value of learning what's built-in to tools like the postgrex library. Allen shares how Postgres PubSub elegantly solved a problem for him and he gives tips for using it. We also talk about teaching Elixir th...

We talk with Allan MacGregor about implementing the Circuit Breaker pattern in Elixir and compare that to just using a job library. We get into a fun discussion about design patterns in Elixir and designing for failure. Allan is creating a project called Site Guardian using the PETAL stack and shares his experiences with it and much more! Show Notes online - http://podcast.thinkingelixir.com/32 El...

We talk with Oleg Tarasenko and Tze Yiing about crawling the web using Elixir. Oleg created the crawly project to help solve this problem and Tze Yiing joined him as a contributor and maintainer. We cover how Elixir is well suited to orchestrate crawling, how to deal with login pages, understanding the legal concerns, building a codeless scraper and much more! Show Notes online - http://podcast.th...

We talk with Devon Estes, the creator of a new Elixir mutation testing library called Muzak. Devon joins us to explain what mutation testing is and how it can help development teams in organizations move faster and with greater confidence. We cover when a project can benefit from it, the challenges of offering a PRO version of a library, where Muzak is going in the future, and more! Show Notes onl...

We talk with Parker Selbert, the creator of the job processing library Oban. He shares the benefits of using Postgres as the data store over more common choices like Redis. Oban also offers a paid "pro" level and Parker explains how a paid feature set is provided for the OpenSource library. He helps us understand the differences between pro and free as well. We talk about how the BEAM's concurrenc...

We talk with Jason Axelson. He created the DepViz tool that can help improve your Elixir compile-time experience. Jason explains how to use the tool to identify where compile time dependencies may be causing issues in your project and provides tips on what to do about it. We also cover recent improvements in Elixir 1.11 and coming improvements in 1.12 and what those will mean for you! Jason is als...

We talk with Zach Daniel, the creator of the Ash Framework, a declarative, resource-oriented application framework for Elixir that lets you build out JSON or GraphQL APIs in minutes. In this episode he explains the history, guiding doctrine of Declarative Design how it can give developers a huge boost without boxing them into a corner! Show Notes online - http://podcast.thinkingelixir.com/27 Elixi...

We talk with Jonathan Allen, an instructor at a Utah college, who taught Elixir to his Distributed Computing students. He tells how he got Elixir into the classroom, what the students loved, what was hard, and how we in the professional community can influence Elixir in education! Show Notes online - http://podcast.thinkingelixir.com/26 Elixir Community News https://twitter.com/josevalim/status/13...

We talk with Marlus Saraiva about three big projects he is a part of. All of which are around improving the developer experience in Elixir! We start with Broadway, a library that makes working with GenStage even easier. We learn about his project Surface that brings a more react-like component model to LiveView. We then talk about his work on ElixirSense and ElixirLS which are used by editors to g...

We talk with Chris McCord about the Phoenix LiveView 0.15.0 release which includes uploads! Chris explains the background on the release and his video showing it off. He shares his go-to stack when starting a new Phoenix project (HINT it includes TailwindCSS). We talk about current gaps in the tooling and where things might go from here in both the short and long term. A great visit with lots of i...

We talk with Louis Pilfold about how he created Gleam, a static typed language that runs on the BEAM. Louis explains some of the challenges with bringing static types to the BEAM and shares ideas on what can possibly be done about it. We learn how Gleam got started, how it works, and how Elixir and Erlang can interop with it. We cover the recently released Gleam OTP work, talk about Type Driven De...

We talk with Patryk Bąk about running migrations in production. For production systems where downtime or service interruptions are a problem, we sometimes need to take special care when migrating data structures or the data itself. Patryk shares some valuable tips and techniques along with examples of when to use them. We chime in with war stories, our own tips, and mistakes we've made. A great re...

We talk with Patrick Thompson about the PETAL stack. The combination of Phoenix, Elixir, Tailwind CSS, Alpine.js and LiveView! Patrick and David help me understand why people are excited about Tailwind CSS and how it works nicely with Alpine.js. Add LiveView to it and it makes a convincing case! Learn about this powerful and productive stack. Patrick shares his insight and a ton of great resources...

We reached outside the Elixir community to talk with Caleb Porzio. Caleb is the creator of PHP Laravel LiveWire, a framework inspired by LiveView. He created Alpine.js to help solve problems common to both LiveWire and LiveView. He also shares how he made his OpenSource work sustainable, and successfully shifted to being full-time supported for his community work. Lots of great insight and discuss...

We cover the news then talk with Milada Majáková about combining Elixir and art. Milada came new to Elixir from Architecture and Graphic Design. We reject the idea that people are either logical or artistic but not both. She shares her journey, what it was like learning Elixir as a first programming language, creating generative art using Elixir and LiveView, and much more! Show Notes online - htt...

We cover the news then talk with German Velasco about his free book "Test-Driven Development with Phoenix". He shares his experiences of learning TDD at ThoughtBot, his writing process, tips and more. On TDD, we talk about the benefits we see, the process of "Red Green Refactor", tools and even when we don’t do it. Some great insights! Show Notes online - http://podcast.thinkingelixir.com/18 Elixi...

We cover the news then talk with Lukas Larsson and John Högberg to learn about the new BeamAsm project that brings a JIT compiler to Erlang OTP and Elixir. This is a very exciting development for all Beam languages and they break down for us what it is, how it works, how it impacts us as Elixir developers, when to expect it, and they share insights into developing OTP. An episode you don’t want to...

We cover the news then talk with Quinn Wilton about Gleam, a static typed language on the BEAM and why Elixir devs should care about it. We learn about her Chip8 emulator that renders game ROMs to LiveView, what dynamic security analysis of web applications can look like today, static typing, library recommendations and much more! Show Notes online - http://podcast.thinkingelixir.com/16 Elixir Com...

We cover the news then talk with Hugo Baraúna, the guy behind Elixir Radar, to get the inside scoop. Would you like to increase the chances of your blog post being featured by Elixir Radar? Hugo shares how! We also discuss his observations of Elixir adoption in companies, better understanding our own community, sustainability in OpenSource, his efforts to fund his time on Elixir Radar, and much mo...

Huge batch of news! Then we talk with Ricardo Garcia Vega about how he paired a Phoenix application with no database Repo to an Airtable backend to quickly solve a problem but without compromising on speed or reliability. Includes great discussion of ETS tables, GenServers for syncing a cache, LiveView for live updates, links to great resources, a github repo for doing it yourself and much more! S...

We talk with Jesse Herrick about creating a video chat app using WebRTC and Phoenix LiveView. We cover the WebRTC protocol, how Phoenix helps, JS hooks, pushing events from the server and much more! Show Notes online - http://podcast.thinkingelixir.com/13 Elixir Community News https://twitter.com/bcardarella/status/1301959070493138944 – Elixir Ecosystem Survey overall results https://twitter.com/b...

We catch up with Connor Rigby and learn about his recent Flutter work for Nerves. We take this opportunity to get his perspective on when to choose NIFs or Ports for native integrations, how to make NIFs more portable, get a recommendation for multimedia processing and much more! Show Notes online - http://podcast.thinkingelixir.com/12 Elixir Community News https://twitter.com/chris_mccord/status/...

Learning about some new features coming in Ecto 3.5 from Mike Binns. Mike explains Ecto. Enum, what a ParameterizedType is, the new "redact" option on fields and much more! Show Notes online - http://podcast.thinkingelixir.com/11 Elixir Community News http://blog.erlang.org/the-new-scalable-ets-ordered_set/ – Improvements in OTP 22 explained in more detail. https://elixir-lang.org/blog/categories....

News and discussion about why the talk of “Frontend vs Backend” is wrong, Single Page Apps, seeing the business value of LiveView, and much more! Show Notes online - http://podcast.thinkingelixir.com/10 Elixir Community News https://elixirforum.com/t/nerves-raspberry-pi-systems-v2-0-0-release-candidates/33446 – Nerves Raspberry Pi Systems v2.0.0 release candidates https://twitter.com/1stavenger/st...