Thinking Elixir Podcast

We get a glimpse into the EEF's Security Working Group with Bram Verburg. We learn about existing resources available to the community and we get hints of work underway for the future. Bram shares some cool security tips and insights as well! Show Notes online - http://podcast.thinkingelixir.com/134 Elixir Community News http://example.com/ – Example website https://github.com/phoenixframework/pho...

We talk with Philip Brown who started Prise in Jan 2022 using Elixir, Axon and Nx to apply machine learning to project management. He shares what he's accomplished as a one-person dev team and how Elixir enabled him to develop more rapidly. He shares how, with no ML academic training, he learned as he went and developed and trained his own models that classify and prioritize people's tasks spread...

LiveView isn't always the right answer. Chris Nelson created LiveState to enable embedding custom HTML components in other websites and connect over Phoenix channels to keep UI state on the server! LiveState takes an interesting approach that tries to keep many of the benefits of LiveView but apply it to situations like custom components in static sites hosted by other people. Chris explains how i...

Securing our apps is our responsibility as developers. We are the custodians and the guardians of our user's data. We met up again with Michael Lubas to discuss some lesser known community security resources and helpful tips to get us started with securing our Elixir and Phoenix applications! Show Notes online - http://podcast.thinkingelixir.com/131 Elixir Community News https://erlangforums.com/t...

The Elixir community is buzzing with excitement around Bumblebee! Bumblebee makes it easy to use a variety of pre-trained neural network models in Elixir. José Valim, Paulo Valente, and Jonatan Kłosko join us to talk about this latest advancement. We learn how Bumblebee works, the abilities that are supported today, where things are going next and the longer term visions of what's possible. We cov...

Tracking, analyzing and visualizing time series data can add a lot of business value to a project! We met up with Dave Lucia to learn more about Timescale DB, a PostgreSQL extension that adds time series tools to our regular database. Dave also created a timescale hex package to make it easier to work with hypertables and hyperfunctions. We learn why Timescale DB makes sense over other options, ho...

The Phoenix 1.7 announcement blog post mentioned the ability to swap out Cowboy for another webserver like Bandit. We talked with Mat Trudel to learn more about his pure-Elixir webserver and find out how it works with Phoenix. We learn Bandit can be up to 5x faster by narrowly focusing on turning a request into a Plug connection and much more! Show Notes online - http://podcast.thinkingelixir.com/...

We talked with Spawnfest competitors Filipe Cabaço & Joel Carlbark about their entry “Lively”. Lively was all about doing cool things with Ecto in Livebook. The project, later renamed to KinoEcto does 4 cool things around Ecto in Livebook. It builds Entity Relationship diagrams from the Ecto Schemas in your Elixir project. It can visualize the dense Postgres explain output and highlight a prob...

As software developers, there are many different types of companies we can work at. We met up with the Elixir Wizards crew to learn more about working at a Software Agency like SmartLogic. We compare what this is like vs working at a product company. Of course, we take the opportunity to learn more about Sundi Myint and Owen Bickford, their journeys to Elixir and the work they are doing now. Sundi...

While hearing how Elixir is being used in the Royal Bank of Canada's Capital Markets, we learned a lot of extra things we didn't expect! Thanos Vassilakis, head of R&D in the CM group, explained how middle managers talk about “scaling” to mean hiring staff with the goal of using all of their budgets. Not the kind of scaling we typically think about! Thanos identified the biggest problem limiti...

We wanted to go deeper on the caching library Nebulex, so we visited with the creator, Carlos Bolaños, to learn what prompted its creation. Nebulex takes a couple unique approaches to things. It supports a decorator pattern to indicate that a function should be cached without having to write the boilerplate code for reading and writing to the cache. Nebulex was inspired by Ecto, in that it support...

Creator of the Ash Framework, Zach Daniel, shares how he feels Ecto is such a good tool, that people haven't built a modeling layer above it and end up using Ecto directly. Ash models a resource above Ecto, making it more expressive while supporting LiveView, REST, and GraphQL interfaces on top. While cutting boilerplate, a major goal builds in escape hatches to keep from being boxed in. Ash Frame...

It’s important to learn safe coding practices. As developers, we want people to love our products and happily pay to use them. We also want to protect our services and users from hackers and information leaks. However, sometimes we unknowingly create vulnerabilities in our systems. One of the best ways to prevent problems is to train the team working on the project. To help do this, Holden Oullett...

She started at the very beginning of her self-directed, non-traditional route to coding. She first had to learn to code. She worked, studied, and leaned on mentors and others until she reached the point of being hired for a full time job. What language did she tackle as that very first one? Elixir! We talked with Kimberly Johnson about how she did it. She shared her story at ElixirConf which we fo...

Localizing and personalizing an application is separate from the language used in the interface. Kip Cole explains how the mismatch of computers with the culture of our audience creates friction we may not even be aware of. In fact, our benign app may be unintentionally offensive to millions of people! Kip created the libraries ex_cldr, money and tempo to help Elixir developers localize applicatio...

Kat Marchán was the maintainer of NPM CLI for 5 years but now works at Microsoft on the VisualStudio product. Kat is passionate about Rust and uses Elixir and Phoenix to build a new Banchan Art site to serve artists. It helps connect artists with clients who want to commission custom artwork. The goal is to create a platform that does not exploit artists like many of the existing options. Amazingl...

Honoring a user's “right to be forgotten” is not only respectful, but it may be a legal requirement. Clément Quaresma joins us to share how their ecto_anon library helps us make a user anonymous. A naive approach at removing a user's data may corrupt our own database! We dig into how this library works, the problems it solves, and how it might be used for even more than GDPR compliance. Show Notes...

A UI Storybook for Phoenix LiveView components? Christian Blavier joins to share what his team created and made OpenSource. The project was even mentioned during Chris McCord's keynote as possibly becoming part of the Phoenix project. We learn what a UI Storybook is, how it works in a project, and how it helps teams and individuals maintain consistent styles throughout a project. Show Notes online...

In episode 110, we talked about, and rejected, the argument for the “End of Localhost Development”. Carter Bryden joins us to share a perspective from the other side, one in favor of remote development. We learn about the benefits to contractors, PR reviews, giving demos, and how containerizing our development environment even improves local development. We learn about the tools, services, and tec...

ElixirConf US 2022 just finished! We cover the big announcements, talk highlights, and other relevant tech news. We discuss what some of these big announcements and projects represent and what they might mean for the Elixir community going forward. We talk about the Elixir 1.14 release, Livebook advances, Phoenix 1.7, machine learning progress, and the surprise announcement of Phoenix LiveView Nat...

We cover the news and look forward to ElixirConf US which is about to start! We talk about breaking changes that somehow manage to not break things, why Cade is excited by time series databases, and the announcements and conference activities we're looking forward to. Show Notes online - http://podcast.thinkingelixir.com/114 Elixir Community News https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix_live_vi...

Livebook Desktop is a recent project that makes it much easier for people to start using Elixir and Livebook. Wojtek Mach joins us to explain what Livebook Desktop is and how it works. We learn who the project is for and the problems it helps solve. We ask if this approach makes sense for other projects and how to get started. Wojtek also shares some cool things in the works that make it possible...

Google Chrome extension that displays a LiveView and integrates with a web page like Gmail? Steve Bussey shares how he did just that! We learn how it worked, why he did it, the benefits he sees, and how this differs from the conventional approach. He explains the small JS shim used, recommends a library to help when integrating with Gmail and he explains how the user experience is great, particula...

Ever wanted to deploy a PR to a temporary server for show-and-tell, QA testing, or to get feedback on it? Jason Axelson joins us to share how he did that on Render.com. We explore how it can be done on other platforms like Fly.io as well. We talk about how this ability benefits teams and companies. We dig into how setting up a seeded DB for the code isolates data changes but also makes it easier f...

Some people excitedly talk about the “end of localhost development” when developer machines move to the cloud. Presumably this is better because our environments, infrastructure and projects are so complex that they need this additional layer of abstraction just to keep teams productive. Is this our inevitable future? Or is this trying to solve the wrong problem? We talk about what we think this m...