Elixir Mix

In this episode of ElixirMix, we visit with Steven Nunez about how Flatiron School adopted Elixir and is using RabbitMQ. He shares how he decides to “rails new” or “mix phx.new” for a project. How adopting Elixir in a team goes better when the team “falls in love” with what it gives them. Steven shares how their RabbitMQ queues are setup, how the messages are designed, how to spread the patterns throughout the teams and projects, and much more! Panelists Mark Ericksen Josh Adams Sophie DeBenedetto Eric Oestrich Guest Steven Nunez Sponsors CacheFly ____________________________________________________________ "The MaxCoders Guide to Finding Your Dream Developer Job" by Charles Max Wood is now available on Amazon. Get Your Copy Today! ____________________________________________________________ Links PluralsightGithub jondot/sneakersRabbitMQKafka ApacheEventideProtocol BuffersRabbitMQ Tutorial One ElixirGithub bitwalker/exprotobufRabbitMQ Tutorial Six Eli

In this episode of Elixir Mix the panel interviews Evadne Wu about the Packmatic Library. The show begins with recent announcements specifically the acquisition of Plataformatec. Evadne works at Faria Education Group as Head of Exam Sytems developing apps using Elixir. Evadne works with a small team and he talks about the pros and cons of working in a small team. Evadne then talks about what the Packmatic Library is, why it was created, and how it works. Finally, Evadne talks about writing, promoting and maintaining an open source library. Panelists Mark Ericksen Eric Oestrich Sophie DeBenedetto Guest Evadne Wu Sponsors CacheFly ____________________________________________________________ "The MaxCoders Guide to Finding Your Dream Developer Job" by Charles Max Wood is now available on Amazon. Get Your Copy Today! ____________________________________________________________ Links https://elixirforum.com/t/plataformatec-acqui-hired-by-nubank/28072/7?u=brainlid

In this episode of Elixir Mix the panel interviews Mike Binns. Mike is a Senior Software Engineer at DockYard, Inc. and he presented at ElixirConf 2019 about getting a whole team new to Elixir up to speed quickly with Cars.com. Mike explains why Elixir was chosen as the technology to use and how much effort and planning goes into helping a team transition. Cars.com had already decided to move onto Elixir and brought on DockYard to train their engineers. Mike advises recognizing the existing team's previous skill set and experience levels. Mike and fellow DockYard colleague captured what they learned in Project Ironman which automatically adds things like credo, dialyzer, coveralls, mix test watch, etc… to your project. They then talk about what mob programming is and how it helps to arm a new team. Finally, the panel asks Mike if he would do anything differently and tips for bringing new developers into a running project and team. Panelists Mark Ericksen Josh Adams Sophie DeBenedett

In this episode of Elixir Mix the panel interviews Mariano Guerra. Mariano wrote some wonderful tutorial blogs outlining how to use Riak Core in Elixir. He begins the episode by sharing a little about himself and his work. Mariano then defines Riak Core and tells the story of where it came from. He explains what he loves about Riak Core and dubs himself the unofficial cheerleader of Riak Core.   Mariano tells the panel about his blog articles and what listeners will find in them. He explains to the panel what inspired him to write them. Mariano then gives the panel examples of the problems solved by Riak Core and the best use cases for it. Partisan is the next subject the panel asks Mariano about. Mariano shares the story of where Partisan came from and explains when you want to use it.    Finally, Mariano tells the panel about his work for the Erlang Ecosystem Foundation. Right now he is working hard to unify the documentation for all the Beam languages. He shares his admiration for the Elixir documentat

In this episode of Elixir Mix the panel interviews Sophie DeBenedetto. Sophie spoke at both The Big Elixir and ElixirConf 2019 about LiveView. She also works at Flatiron School. Sophie starts by sharing a little about Flatiron School, what they offer and what she does for them. The panel shares their experience with the quality of graduates from Flatiron School. Sophie explains that Flatiron School is all about community and they teach their students to love learning.  Sophie discusses her talks and shares the experiences she had with LiveView that inspired her talks. She tells the panel what it was like preparing for the talks. She explains the problems she faced with her LiveView project and how she eventually fixed it.  In one talk Sophie talks about looking under the hood at LiveView. She tells the panel about this experience, this leads the panel to discuss the LiveView documentation. They consider the helpfulness of the phrase “it’s a process” in the documentation. Sophie explains how she prefers docu

In this episode of Elixir Mix the panel discusses monorepos. They start by defining monorepos and sharing examples of what this looks like. The panelists share the pros and cons of working in a monorepo. They discuss the different projects they worked on using a monorepo and what their experience was like.    Monorepos allow for rapid development.  Any developer can pull it down and work on it. They work better for teams who are new with a new project and they are still trying to figure out where everything goes. In situations like these, quality is not a large concern but once quality is a priority monorepos make less sense.    On the other hand, monorepos make it easier for developers to forget that these applications are distinct. It also makes it easy for developers to ignore older versions of applications. The panel considers if monorepos are worth these downsides. The panel considers how monorepos work with Live View. They also discuss using an umbrella project similarly to monorepos.  Panelists

In this episode of Elixir Mix the panel interviews Miriam Pena, founder of the Erlang Ecosystem Foundation. Miriam shares a little about her background and how she got into Erlang and Elixir. Miriam gave a talk at Elixir Conf about the OTP 22 release and she shares some of the exciting new features in this release.  Persistent terms are the first feature Miriam shares with the panel. After explaining what it is Miriam shares examples of the best use cases for this tool. The panel discusses the benefits of this module and how it is faster than ets tables. Next, the discuss the benefits and use cases of counters.  The panel shares what they got out of her Elixir Conf talk. It helped them relieve that the Erlang ecosystem is still alive and contributing. The encourage Elixir users to keep an eye out on OTP releases and stay on top of the tools and features that the Erlang team works so hard to provide for them.  Miriam shares a little about the Erlang Ecosystem Foundation, its goals and how they got started.

In this episode of Elixir Mix the panel has a conversation about a few things they have been thinking about. First, they shout out to anyone who would love to chat about config change callbacks. Then they dive into deployment discussing the updates that have happened this year. They share their experiences with the changes and compare the Elixir release to Distillery.  There are many options for deployment and they discuss some of the ones they have used. They consider services and do it yourself options. The panel shares lessons learned through their deployment experiences and give pro-tips for beginners and those new to Elixir.  The next topic they discuss is hot code reload. Michael shares his fascination with this practice and explains what it is. The panel discusses the possibilities and use-cases for hot code reload. Hot code upgrade is also discussed.  Panelists Mark Ericksen Michael Ries Eric Oestrich Sponsors Sentry– use the code “devchat” for two months free on Sent

In this episode of Elixir Mix the panel syncs up by discussing The Big Elixir Conference, their favorite talks and what they are working on. The first talk they discuss is Scott Southworth’s talk about medical messaging and the impressive work he does with the HL7 parser.  Next, they discuss Ben Church’s talk about business logic where he talks about leex and yecc. The panel discusses leex, yeccs and their own work with parsers. Cory O’Daniel’s talk on Kubereneters the panel found particularly funny and interesting. Elixir Mix’s very own Eric Oestrich was the keynote speaker at the talk, he summarizes his talk for the panel.The Live View talk given by Sophie DeBenedetto is discussed as well and the panel shares their biggest take away from the talk.    The panel discusses a little of what they have been working on. They ask Eric about his Ponchbrella project. He explains what it is and how it works. Using this hybrid of poncho and umbrella projects for grapevine made more sense to him. He invites everyone

In this episode of Elixir Mix the panel interviews Parker Selbert. Parker lives in Chicago and runs a consultancy with his wife. He joins the panel to discuss a library that he wrote, Oban. Parker starts by explaining what Oban is and why he wrote it. Oban is a way to run reliable background jobs by persisting them in the database. Oban is akin to Sidekick, Parker explains, he wanted something similar to Sidekick for Elixir. He made a few improvements including moving it to Postgres from Redis. He shares the common problems found using Redis and how easy Postgres was to use for this library.  The panel asks Parker about his Oban Recipes. Parker explains why he wrote the recipes and what some of them contain. After releasing Oban he received many questions asking about how to use Oban. Parker took the most common questions and wrote 7 blog post outlining how to use Oban.  Parker shares his favorite features found in Oban and walks the panel through its architecture. The panel asks him about the maturity and

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In this episode of Elixir Mix the panel interviews  Nathan Long about Pheonix Phrenzy. Nathan explains what Pheonix Phrenzy is and what the contest is all about. The panel explains how exciting it is for everyone to see what Live View can really do. With all the submissions open-sourced, the consider what a great resource the submissions are for those learning to use Live View.  Nathan explains his motivations behind Pheonix Phrenzy. He explains what they learned from this contest and what they may do in future contests. Nathan shares how wonderful it was to work with everyone at Dockyard on Pheonix Phrenzy. He explains how the competition worked, the role of the VIP judges and how the site was designed to make the contest as fair as possible.  The top three submissions are shared, the panel is impressed by how different each of the projects are. Nathan shares all the amazing things developers get when they use Live View. The panel considers when to use Live View. The episode finishes as Nathan shares what

In this episode of Elixir Mix the panel interviews Jason Fertel who runs the marketing automation team at PepsiCo eCommerce. Jason shares the story of bringing Elixir to PepsiCo eCommerce and explains how it became their go-to for application development.   Jason explains what they do at PepsiCo eCommerce. They build software to optimize everything from supply chain to marketing and sales for big companies in eCommerce like Amazon.com and InstaCart. He explains the difference between what they do at PepsiCo eCommerce and other CPG’s.  The panel asks Jason about what Elixir has brought to the table at PepsiCo eCommerce. He explains why he chose Elixir when he started out as a one-man development team. Elixir is powerful, straight forward and easy to learn. It is efficient and has everything you need out of the box. Jason shares how using Elixir has also had a positive effect on hiring. The panel considers how using Elixir has benefitted hiring at their companies as well.  The episode ends with Jason outlini

On this episode of Elixir Mix the panelists interview Eric Oestrich, one of the regular panelists for the show. Eric is a developer at SmartLogic where he works with Elixir and recently has been working with deployments. He has a project called Grapevine which is similar to steam but for text games. Mark opens up the discussion by asking Eric to talk about his game ExVenture which is a MUD game. MUD stands for multi user dungeon and ExVenture is a multi user version of a text adventure game from 1978 called Dungeon. He shares more details of the game and how it’s played. Erit explains that Grapevine was spawned from ExVenture and Mark asks him to expound more on Grapevine.  ExVenture is open source and it is an application that is currently running in production. This provides opportunity for those not interested in making or playing a MUD to get involved and work on a project. Eric also goes into detail about the livestreaming he does and how to get involved. Since the project is open source, Eric is able

Jeff Kreeftmeijer works at Appsignal where they create a tool for application monitoring that works in Ruby and Elixir. He works specifically with integrations focusing in Elixir and also writes articles for their Elixir and Ruby newsletters. Jeff started as a Ruby programmer but had an interest in functional programming which lead him to gain an interest in Elixir. When he started at Appsignal they were already considering an Elixir integration and that made it a perfect fit.  Jeff then shares more details about his involvement in Appsignal’s two newsletters called Ruby magic and Elixir alchemy, both of which are aimed at more experienced programmers. He also details his experience with articles that he wrote on Live Share and how he came to write them. The panelists also introduce the Go game that is written about in these articles. The next topic covered by the Elixir experts is the Go game Live View implementation mentioned in Jeff’s articles. The panelists draw comparisons of how something similar coul

This episode of Elixir mix opens with Lars Wikman and Emilio Nyaray sharing how they came to be working together on a project called Inky. Inky is an E-Ink display that works with Nerves and Elixir. The project started when Lars wanted to use the Inky device from Nerves but didn’t want to install Python to do it. Emilio wanted to join because he found it fascinating to be able to control this device with Elixir. Lars and Emilio share some details of how this project came about and how it works.  The inky comes in multiple sizes with the smaller pHAT display being about the size of a business card and the Inky wHAT being closer to the size of a Raspberry Pi. Lars shares that one of the biggest gotchas with these displays is the refresh rate. Once the pixels are changed the device can be turned off and still remain the same because they are physically changing. The panelists highlight that very little troubleshooting time had to go in to the Nerves portion of the project. Lars describes how he began looking at

This episode of Elixir Mix features Arkadiusz Gil. Arkadiusz is a software engineer at Erlang Solutions. He is also a member of the observability working group of the Erlang Ecosystem Foundation. The purpose of this working group is to nurture different areas of the community to maintain libraries, improve tooling, and create documentation. He became a member of this group because of his work on Telemetry. The panelists discuss the background of Telemetry and Arkadiusz explains how it was originally written in Elixir and why they decided to switch over to Erlang. Arkadiusz explains how he became involved in Elixir and Erlang. When Mark asks why he prefers Elixir to Erlang he responds with explaining his affinity for the Elixir syntax and tooling that’s available.  The conversation then moves to how Telemetry came about. Telemetry started with the goal of creating a tool for monitoring Elixir applications but the creators had no idea what that application would be like. Arkadiusz then describes how he did an

In this week’s episode of Elixir Mix the panel interviews Travis Elnicky, software architect at Podium. Podium is Utah based company that has been using Elixir for three years. Travis explains Podium’s history and its experience adopting Elixir.  When Travis started at Podium they were a small startup with, he was their 16th employee. They were using Ruby on Rails and focusing on collecting reviews for local businesses. When they saw a need for a messenger application, they tried a few solutions choosing Elixir because of the familiarity they felt coming from a Rails background. After switching to Elixir, Podium grew rapidly. Now Podium has 700 employees, 130 of whom are engineers.  Travis discusses with the panel how things are run over at Podium. Their teams are aligned around products and features. This makes all their engineers' full-stack developers. Podiums teams run with a lot of autonomy, they also have teams that help with internal tooling to tie the products together. The panel is curious about t

In this week’s episode of Elixir Mix the panel interviews Chris Keathley about Norm and his recent talk at ElixirConf. Chris is currently working at Bleacher Report, working mostly on backend systems. The panel starts by complimenting his presentation skills and asking him about his dislike for dialyzer.    Chris share the many problems he has with dialyzer. Dialyzer takes a lot of time and has crappy ergonomics. While it tells you a lot about an Erlang system that benefit doesn’t extend to Elixir systems. Neither doesn’t understand protocols. Mostly he feels that most type algebras don’t allow for growth, making changes and making the breaking changes. Explaining that type systems all have their costs and benefits, he feels that you don’t see the benefits of dialyzer until your system is up and running.   The panel wonders about Norm, a library written by Chris. Chris explains what it is and what its aims are. He wrote the library to solve some of the problems seen with dialyzer and other problems he was

In this episode of Elixir Mix the panel interviews Jon Carstens about his work with Nerves. Michael Ries gives a little background on Jon, as they have worked together and Jon helps run the remote nerves meet up that Michael attends.  Jon recently started working with Frank Hunleth at Smart Rent. Jon tells the panel what an adventure it is working at Smart Rent.   The panel asks Jon about the parts of the Nerves ecosystem he has been working in. He explains how he has been working with NervesHub to manage collections or groups of devices. He has also been working with ShoeHorn controlling app start order and erlang heart stop module. Making sure that they can remote reboot devices.    Jon talks more about what Smart Rent does. He explains that there are lots of brands and types of smart home devices, not all of which can connect to the internet. At Smart Rent, they connect various brands and devices using their own custom-built hub. Smart Rent has many benefits tenants and even more for property managers.