For the Season 13 finale, Elixir Wizards Dan and Charles are joined by Spin42 Engineers Marc Lainez, Thibault Poncelet, and Loïc Vigneron to discuss their work retrofitting a 2007 VW Polo and creating an Open Vehicle Control System (OVCS). Using Elixir, Nerves, and Raspberry Pis, the team is reimagining vehicle technology to extend the lifespan of older cars and reduce waste—all while making the process approachable and open source.

The Spin42 team shares the technical details behind OVCS and how they use Elixir and Nerves to interact with the CAN bus and build a Vehicle Management System (VMS) to coordinate various vehicle components. They dive into the challenges of reverse engineering CAN messages, designing a distributed architecture with Elixir processes, and ensuring safety with fail-safe modes and emergency shutoffs.

Beyond the technical, the team discusses their motivation for the project—upgrading older vehicles with modern features to keep them on the road, building an open-source platform to share their findings with others, and above all-- to just have fun. They explore potential applications for OVCS in boats, construction equipment, and other vehicles, while reflecting on the hurdles of certifying the system for road use.

If you’ve ever wondered how Elixir and Nerves can drive innovation beyond software, this episode is packed with insights into automotive computing, hardware development, and the collaborative potential of open-source projects.

https://www.spin42.com/

Special Guests: Loïc Vigneron, Marc Lainez, and Thibault Poncelet.

The Elixir Wizards welcome Jim Freeze, organizer of ElixirConf and creator of the Horizon library. Jim shares his journey from organizing Ruby conferences to founding and growing ElixirConf into the community cornerstone it is today. He reflects on the challenges of running a major conference, how COVID-19 shaped the event, and why the talks remain an evergreen resource for the Elixir ecosystem.

We discuss Horizon, Jim’s deployment library for Elixir and Phoenix applications with Postgres on FreeBSD. Driven by a need for simplicity and cost-effectiveness, Jim explains how Horizon minimizes external dependencies while delivering fault-tolerant and streamlined setups. He compares it to tools like Fly, Terraform, and Ansible, highlighting its low cognitive load and flexibility—key benefits for developers seeking more control over their deployment environments.

Jim also unpacks the broader value of understanding and customizing your deployment stack rather than relying solely on managed services. He discusses the benefits of using FreeBSD, including its stability, security, and performance advantages, as well as its robust ZFS file system.

Jim emphasizes the importance of coherent deployment workflows, community collaboration, and contributions to open-source projects like Horizon. He invites listeners to explore Horizon, share feedback, and own their deployments.

Nine Minutes of Elixir

Special Guest: Jim Freeze.

Zack Kayser and Ethan Gunderson, Software Engineers at Cars Commerce, join the Elixir Wizards to share their expertise on telemetry and observability in large-scale systems. Drawing from their experience at Cars.com—a platform handling high traffic and concurrent users—they discuss the technical and organizational challenges of scaling applications, managing microservices, and implementing effective observability practices.

The conversation highlights the pivotal role observability plays in diagnosing incidents, anticipating system behavior, and asking unplanned questions of a system. Zack and Ethan explore tracing, spans, and the unique challenges introduced by LiveView deployments and WebSocket connections.

They also discuss the benefits of OpenTelemetry as a vendor-agnostic instrumentation tool, the significance of Elixir’s telemetry library, and practical steps for developers starting their observability journey. Additionally, Zack and Ethan introduce their upcoming book, Instrumenting Elixir Applications, which will offer guidance on integrating telemetry and tracing into Elixir projects.

https://www.carscommerce.inc/

Special Guests: Ethan Gunderson and Zack Kayser.

AJ (Alykhan Jetha), CEO and CTO of Marketcircle, joins the Elixir Wizards to share his experience building and evolving Daylite, their award-winning CRM and business productivity app for Apple users. He details his experiences as a self-taught programmer and how Marketcircle has navigated pivots, challenges, and opportunities since its founding in 1999.

AJ explains why they migrated Daylite’s backend to Elixir, focusing on their sync engine, which demands high concurrency and fault tolerance. He highlights how Elixir has improved performance, reduced cloud costs, and simplified development with its approachable syntax and productive workflows.

The conversation also touches on the technical hurdles of deploying native apps for Apple devices and the potential for integrating new technologies like LiveView Native to streamline cross-platform development.

For technical founders, AJ emphasizes the importance of leveraging your strengths (“superpowers”), staying deeply connected to the development process, and finding stability in tools like Elixir amidst a rapidly evolving tech ecosystem. He also shares Marketcircle’s roadmap for migrating more customers to Elixir-powered systems and explores the potential for new features in their native apps.

Tune in for insights on building resilient systems, navigating technical and business challenges, and how Elixir is shaping Marketcircle’s future.

https://www.marketcircle.com/

Special Guest: Alykhan Jetha.

Justin Tormey, co-founder of Castmagic, joins the Elixir Wizards to discuss building an AI-powered content creation app. Castmagic repurposes audio and video into social media posts, blog articles, newsletters, and more. The tech stack leverages OpenAI and Anthropic LLMs with Elixir as the coordination layer and Phoenix LiveView powering the front end.

Justin dives into the technical details of Castmagic, including the integration of JavaScript libraries like ProseMirror and TipTap through LiveSvelte, as well as enabling real-time collaboration with CRDTs and YDoc. He shares the benefits and challenges of using Elixir for rapid development, as well as the trade-offs between custom code and off-the-shelf solutions.

The conversation also covers Justin’s entrepreneurial journey, highlighting the advantages of bootstrapping over venture capital, the importance of acquiring early customers, and creative marketing strategies like affiliate programs and software marketplaces.

Whether you're an Elixirist exploring machine learning or an aspiring tech founder, tune in to learn more about AI with Elixir, navigating startup challenges, and turning ideas into impactful software.

https://www.castmagic.io/

Special Guest: Justin Tormey.

Stephen Solka, CTO and co-founder of Standd.io, joins Elixir Wizards Owen and Charles to share the journey of building an AI-native deal intelligence and due diligence platform. Designed to streamline document analysis and text generation for venture capital firms, Standd.io leverages large language models and AI tools to address key customer pain points in document workflows.

Stephen explains how Elixir and Phoenix LiveView enabled rapid UI iteration and seamless integration between the front-end and back-end.

The conversation also explores the human side of startup life. Stephen reflects on balancing tech debt with customer demands, the value of accelerators in building networks and securing funding, and the challenges of pricing in early-stage startups. He emphasizes the importance of validating ideas with potential customers and learning from the hurdles of growing a business.

Tune in for insights on leveraging AI in Elixir, solving real-world problems, and navigating the journey from concept to company.

Contact Stephen & Julie at Standd: [email protected]

Special Guest: Stephen Solka.

Today on Elixir Wizards, Owen Bickford, fellow Wizard and creator of the WebauthnComponents library, joins us to talk about building passwordless authentication for Phoenix LiveView applications. Owen walks us through the evolution of authentication—touching on everything from plain text passwords to multi-factor setups—and explains the security flaws and user experience issues each method presents. He describes passkeys, a solution based on the WebAuthn API, which improves security and ease of use.

The conversation covers cross-device support for passkeys, the role of password managers in keeping credentials synced, and ideas for enhancing WebauthnComponents, like supporting multiple passkeys per account. Owen invites listeners to contribute to the library’s development on GitHub and emphasizes the role passkeys play in improving app security and user experience.

https://github.com/liveshowy/webauthn_components

Today on Elixir Wizards, indie developer Lucas Sifoni shares his experience prototyping a remote-controlled terrestrial telescope using Elixir, Nerves, Rust, and various hardware components.

Lucas explains the basic components of a telescope, the challenges he faced during the development process, and the benefits of using Elixir and Nerves for hardware projects. Lucas emphasizes the importance of simulating hardware components and testing assumptions before working with physical devices, as well as the value of literate programming and executable blog posts for documenting and sharing the process.

Lucas encourages listeners to explore Nerves and build their own hardware projects. He also gives a shout-out to the Nerves core team for their incredible work.

https://lucassifoni.info/

Special Guest: Lucas Sifoni.

Today in the Creator’s Lab, Tony Dang joins Elixir Wizards Sundi Myint and Owen Bickford to break down his journey of creating a local-first, offline-ready to-do app using Phoenix LiveView, Svelte, and CRDTs (Conflict-free Replicated Data Types).

Tony explains why offline functionality matters and how this feature can transform various apps. He shares insights on different libraries, algorithms, and techniques for building local-first experiences and highlights the advantages of Elixir and Phoenix LiveView.

Tony also shares his go-to tools, like Inertia.js for connecting Phoenix backends with JavaScript frontends, and favorite Elixir packages like Oban, Joken, and Hammer, offering a toolkit for anyone building powerful, adaptable applications.

Working in Elevators: How to build an offline-enabled, real-time todo app w/ LiveView, Svelte, & Yjs

Special Guest: Tony Dang.

Today on Elixir Wizards, Bryan Green shares how he transformed a vintage 1930s rotary phone into a fully functional cell phone using Elixir, Nerves, and a mix of hardware components.

Bryan shares the highs and lows of his project, from decoding rotary dial clicks to troubleshooting hardware issues with LED outputs. He explains why Nerves was the perfect fit for this project, offering SSH access, over-the-air updates, and remote debugging. You’ll also hear how Elixir’s concurrency model helped him manage hardware inputs and outputs efficiently using GenStateMachine and Genservers.

Elixir and Nerves really shine when modeling real-world systems. Bryan dives into how he used a finite state machine to track the phone’s states and handled inputs from the rotary dial and hook switch via GPIO.

For hardware enthusiasts, Bryan’s advice is to embrace this “golden age” of DIY electronics. Whether you're experienced with embedded systems or just curious on where to start, Bryan's VintageCell can inspire you to tinker with a hardware engineering project.

Vintage Cellphone: Bridging the Past and Future with Elixir

Special Guest: Bryan Green.