Today, the Elixir Wizards wrap up Season 14 “Enter the Elixirverse.” Dan, Charles, and Sundi look back at some common themes: Elixir plays well with others, bridges easily to access languages and tools, and remains a powerful technology for data flow, concurrency, and developer experience. We revisit the popular topics of the year, from types and tooling to AI orchestration and reproducible dev environments, and share what we’re excited to explore next.

Cars.com

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In this episode of Elixir Wizards, host Sundi Myint chats with SmartLogic engineers and fellow Wizards Dan Ivovich and Charles Suggs about the practical tooling that surrounds Elixir in a consultancy setting. We dig into how standardized dev environments, sensible scaffolding, and clear observability help teams ship quickly across many client projects without turning every app into a snowflake. Join us for a grounded tour of what’s working for us today (and what we’ve retired), plus how we evaluate new tech (including AI) through a pragmatic, Elixir-first lens.

http://smartlogic.io

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Today, co-founders Kimberly Erni and Pei Pei Wang join the Elixir Wizards to discuss their crochet app, LoopedIn. Recognizing a gap in the market for a more user-friendly and interactive crochet pattern experience, they're building an app that makes following patterns easier and more enjoyable for crocheters of all skill levels.

They're building features such as step-by-step guidance, video tutorials, and the ability to upload and convert PDF patterns into an interactive format. Kimberly explains how she's leveraging AI tools to vibe code in Elixir and LiveView.

They highlight the challenges and successes they encountered while creating a Progressive Web App (PWA) that integrates AI-powered features. They also discuss their user research and testing process, which involved gathering feedback from the crochet community to prioritize features and improve the app's UX.

Kimberly and Pei Pei share their thoughts on the potential of AI in the tech industry and how it has assisted them in the development and iteration process. They emphasize the importance of understanding the code generated by AI and the need for proper testing and verification. They offer advice to others looking to create passion projects, stressing the value of finding a partner with complementary skills and shared enthusiasm for the project.

Amigurumis

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In this episode, Elixir Wizard Charles Suggs sits down with Victor Björklund to map out the landscape of Python integration in Elixir applications. From HTTP APIs and external services to embedded runtimes like ErlPort, PythonX, and the Venomous library, we evaluate each approach’s impact on performance, coupling, and developer experience. Victor draws on real-world examples like Scrapy-based web scraping and the Swedish BankID authentication to illustrate best practices for error handling, process pooling, and effective telemetry across the BEAM boundary.

We also tackle the practical side of deployment: packaging Python dependencies in Mix releases, mocking Python calls in tests, and deploying multi-language apps with confidence. Wrapping up, Victor shares his wishlist for even tighter interop (think multiple Python interpreter instances per VM) and offers low-risk entry points, like automating monthly reports, for teams ready to explore the power of Python’s ecosystem within Elixir.

jawdropping.io

In this episode of Elixir Wizards, Charles Suggs sits down with Chris Grainger, co-founder and CTO of Amplified and creator of the Explorer library. Chris explains how Explorer brings the familiar data-frame workflows of R’s dplyr and Python’s pandas into the Elixir world. We explore (pun intended!) how Explorer integrates with Ecto, Nx, and LiveView to build end-to-end data pipelines without leaving the BEAM, and how features like lazy evaluation and distributed frames let you tackle large datasets.

Whether you’re generating reports or driving interactive charts in LiveView, Explorer makes tabular data accessible to every Elixir developer. We wrap up by looking ahead to SQL-style backends, ADBC connectivity, and other features on the Explorer roadmap.

https://hexdocs.pm/explorer/Explorer.html

In this episode of Elixir Wizards, Dan Ivovich and Charles Suggs sit down with Norbert “NobbZ” Melzer to discuss how Nix enables reproducible builds, consistent development environments, and reliable deployments for Elixir projects.

Norbert shares his journey from Ruby to Elixir, contrasts Nix with NixOS, and walks us through flakes, nix-shell workflows, sandboxed builds, and rollback capabilities. Along the way, we cover real-world tips for managing Hex authentication, integrating Nix into CI/CD, wrapping Mix releases in Docker, and avoiding common pitfalls, such as flake performance traps.

Whether you’re spinning up your first dev shell or rolling out a production release on NixOS, you’ll come away with a clear, gradual adoption path and pointers to the community mentors and resources that can help you succeed.

https://jobrad-loop.com/

Elixir creator José Valim returns to the podcast to unpack the latest developments in Elixir’s set-theoretic type system and how it is slotting into existing code without requiring annotations. We discuss familiar compiler warnings, new warnings based on inferred types, a phased rollout in v1.19/v1.20 that preserves backward compatibility, performance profiling the type checks across large codebases, and precise typing for maps as both records and dictionaries.

José also touches on CNRS academic collaborations, upcoming LSP/tooling enhancements, and future possibilities like optional annotations and guard-clause typing, all while keeping Elixir’s dynamic, developer-friendly experience front and center.

https://github.com/elixir-nx

Special Guest: José Valim.

Zack Kayser, Staff Software Engineer at cars.com, joins Elixir Wizards Sundi Myint and Charles Suggs to discuss how Cars.com adopted a server-driven UI (SDUI) architecture powered by Elixir and GraphQL to deliver consistent, updatable interfaces across web, iOS, and Android.

We explore why SDUI matters for feature velocity, how a mature design system and schema planning make it feasible, and what it takes, culturally and technically, to move UI logic from client code into a unified backend.

https://cars.com

Special Guest: Zack Kayser.

Rustler Core Team Member Sonny Scroggin joins Elixir Wizards Sundi Myint and Charles Suggs. Rustler serves as a bridge to write Native Implemented Functions (NIFs) in Rust that can be called from Elixir code. This combo leverages Rust's performance and memory safety while maintaining Elixir's fault tolerance and concurrency model, creating a powerful solution for CPU-intensive operations within Elixir applications.

Sonny provides guidance on when developers should consider using NIFs versus other approaches like ports or external services and highlights the considerations needed when stepping outside Elixir's standard execution model into native code.

Looking toward the future, Sonny discusses exciting developments for Rustler, including an improved asynchronous NIF interface, API modernization efforts, and better tooling. While Rust offers tremendous performance benefits for specific use cases, Sonny emphasizes that Elixir's dynamic nature and the BEAM's capabilities for distributed systems remain unmatched for many applications. Rustler simply provides another powerful tool that expands what developers can accomplish within the Elixir ecosystem.

https://github.com/rusterlium/rustler

Getting Started:

Special Guest: Sonny Scroggin.

Today on Elixir Wizards, hosts Sundi Myint and Charles Suggs catch up with Sean Moriarity, co-creator of the Nx project and author of Machine Learning in Elixir. Sean reflects on his transition from the military to a civilian job building large language models (LLMs) for software. He explains how the Elixir ML landscape has evolved since the rise of ChatGPT, shifting from building native model implementations toward orchestrating best-in-class tools.

We discuss the pragmatics of adding ML to Elixir apps: when to start with out-of-the-box LLMs vs. rolling your own, how to hook into Python-based libraries, and how to tap Elixir’s distributed computing for scalable workloads. Sean closes with advice for developers embarking on Elixir ML projects, from picking motivating use cases to experimenting with domain-specific languages for AI-driven workflows.

https://hexdocs.pm/nx/intro-to-nx.html

Special Guest: Sean Moriarity.