Elixir Wizards

ClusterTruck, a master of vertical integration, is rewriting the method of end-to-end food delivery and ghost kitchens. Today we speak with ClusterTruck Product VP Brian Howenstein to find out more about his journey in programming, ClusterTruck as an end-to-end food service, and how Elixir became mission-critical to the success of the business.

We kick things off by hearing more on Brian’s childhood and how he became interested in programming. We then hear about his internship at Apple where he was part of the Core OS networking team. Brian touches on brushing shoulders with Steve Jobs, Jony Ivy, and Tim Cook, and shares how these personalities changed his view of the tech industry. Later in the show, we turn our attention to current times. Brian expands on his role at ClusterTruck and shares details on how Elixir has played a vital role in the company’s success. We hear his take on vertical integration, why they’d never consider third-party delivery companies, and much more. We then briefly digress to Brian’s hobby: the Scottish Games, before returning to ClusterTruck to find out what his favorite menu items are and what the future holds for food delivery and ghost kitchens.

Be sure to stay tuned to enjoy our mini-feature where we speak with Michelle Morry, a software engineer at FuturePet. For all things Elixir, be sure to join us today!

Bonus: If you’re in Indianapolis, IN, Columbus, OH, or Kansas City, MO, download the ClusterTruck app and use code “ELIXIRWIZARDS” at checkout for a one-time 25% discount on your ClusterTruck order. Good for a single use for both new and returning customers.

Key Points From This Episode:

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

ClusterTruck — https://www.clustertruck.com/

Special Guest: Brian Howenstein.

Building a successful development company requires having a leader with technical know-how and excellent management skills. Today we speak with SmartLogic President and Founder Yair Flicker about his company’s origin story, evolution, and their Elixir adoption process. Early in the episode, we talk about Yair’s first jobs before diving into how he founded SmartLogic. An important transition point, we then chat about how he moved from writing code to running a business. Reflecting on his tech background, Yair opens up about how he learned to code before he shares insights into the languages that his company programs in, how they discovered Elixir, and how they integrated it into their practice. In a discussion that’s sure to resonate with startup managers, Yair unpacks what he does to grow as a manager, along with best practices for companies looking to adopt Elixir. We ask Yair about the benefits of coding in Elixir, how SmartLogic has retained its top employees, why he prioritizes employee happiness, and the role that company values play in strengthening SmartLogic. After hearing about Yair’s vision for the future, we jump into our mini-segment where we interview Jake Johnson, the Director of Software Engineering at TaxJar. For more on building strong companies and advice on adopting Elixir, be sure to tune in and benefit from our conversations with Yair and Jake.

Key Points From This Episode:

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

SmartLogic — https://smartlogic.io/

Special Guest: Yair Flicker.

Despite its welcoming character, the Elixir community struggles with diversity; as the 2020 ElixirConf community survey shows, only 2% of Elixirists are women. Today we speak with Blinker software engineer Alexandra Chakeres about her experience of the community, as well as what we can do to make it more inclusive. We open by exploring Alexandra’s background and coding career. After expressing her enthusiasm for the Turing School, we talk about Alexandra’s learn-by-doing approach to picking up Elixir. She shares how she landed her first Elixir job before we chat about her current role at Blinker. We discuss why the small size of the community means that Alexandra doesn’t recommend Elixir to coding beginners. We then dive into the topic of Elixir diversity, touching on factors that limit inclusivity, including how few Elixir positions are available for juniors. Alexandra unpacks solutions, like how organizations can shift their hiring pipeline and the need to approach diversity organizations with openings. Later, listeners will enjoy our mini-feature segment where we interview Instinct Science engineer Bill Peregoy about how their team uses Elixir. Tune in for more on what we can do to create a more diverse community.

Key Points From This Episode:

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

SmartLogic — https://smartlogic.io/

Special Guest: Alexandra Chakeres.

Elixir is a dynamic, functional language that packs a punch. Built on the strengths of its predecessors like Ruby and Erlang, it sits comfortably in a space where performance and scalability are at a premium. Today we speak with Brian Cardarella, owner and former member of DockYard, to find out more about Elixir and why he feels it serves companies and employees so well. We open the show by studying Elixir’s DNA, learning more about Ruby on Rails and what made it so attractive as an offering during its heyday. Brian then shifts scope and talks about why Ember has steadily failed, and touches on a lack of efficiency and poor marketing strategies as the obvious catalysts for its demise. As our conversation develops, Brian dives deeper into Elixir, sharing nuggets of wisdom and entertaining anecdotes along the way. Listeners will hear why Elixir performs so strongly and how he believes companies should go about adopting the language. Brian expands on the topic and shares which types of clients should be open to Elixir and the methods you can use to convert them. As we near the end of the episode, we hear from Brian about Lumen’s characteristics and at what point developers will be able to write an app without JavaScript in Elixir. To find out more, be sure to join us today!

Key Points From This Episode:

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

BCardarella on Twitter - https://twitter.com/bcardarella

Special Guest: Brian Cardarella.

In this episode we continue our conversation about adopting Elixir, this time with Matt Nowack and Jake Heinz from Discord, hearing them get into the features of Elixir that make it a great fit for building a real-time chat infrastructure system! We also invite Arthi Radhakrishnan from community.com for our mini-interview in the last chunk of the episode. Our chat begins with Jake and Matt telling Elixir developers exactly why they should not use Mnesia. They subsequently dive into their journeys in programming and the process of learning Elixir after joining Discord. They share a few aha-moments as well as challenging projects that asked them to get their heads around some of the more powerful features of Elixir, highlighting a way they used immutability for a project that asked them to efficiently calculate deltas for large member list updates. From there we get into the culture around onboarding new devs at Discord, the company’s popular open-source Elixir contributions, and some brags about the high performance of features of Discord built in Elixir. Wrapping up with Jake and Matt, we hear their suggestions for teams and devs hoping to adopt Elixir, where they strongly advise on learning OTP as well as Elixir’s standard library. After that, it’s time for our chat with Arthi, where we hear about her programming journey, how Elixir is being put to use at Community.com, how the company supports new devs learning Elixir, and more!

Key Points From This Episode:

SmartLogic — https://smartlogic.io/

Special Guests: Jake Heinz and Matt Nowack.

Welcome back to the Elixir Wizards podcast! In this episode, we will be continuing our conversation on the theme of adopting elixir, and our great guest for today is Jason Axelson! Jason is a back-end developer for a mixed reality studio called Animal Repair Shop and has also made some significant contributions to the Elixir Language Server project. We kick off our conversation with Jason hearing about his programming journey and then dive into the event chat service app he helped build using Elixir while he was working at Hobnob. From there, we talk about some of his aha moments while learning Elixir and some of his favorite features about the language which he is putting to use building out the back end for Animal Repair Shop. Next, we turn our attention to Elixir Language Server and Jason weighs in on the IDE type features it offers, why he got started as a collaborator on the project, and some of their challenges in the field of shared governance. Wrapping up for today, Jason makes a few suggestions for how devs who love Elixir can convince their teams to adopt it as a more mainstream option. Tune in for a great chat on the topic of adopting Elixir!

Key Points From This Episode:

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

SmartLogic — https://smartlogic.io/

Special Guest: Jason Axelson.

Anyone who has written software for the travel industry can tell you that it is in desperate need of innovation — shockingly many of their cobwebbed systems were built in the 70s. Today we speak with Duffel CEO Steve Domin, who is building tech that can finally align travel with the expectations of modern consumers. We open by exploring Steve’s journey into coding before diving into how Duffel is innovating travel. After touching on how the pandemic has impacted Duffel’s roll-out, Steve shares horror stories about the outdated tech and API systems that airlines use. We discuss Duffel’s service offerings and why Elixir is uniquely suited to solve the problems that Steve’s company is addressing. Steve then talks about the types of engineers that Duffel hires, his client base, and where his company is heading. Near the end of the episode, we ask Steve for his advice on selling your company on Elixir and we chat about the status of the London Elixir Meetup. Tune in for more insights on how Steve is using Elixir to make travel an effortless experience.

Key Points From This Episode:

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

SmartLogic — https://smartlogic.io/

Special Guest: Steve Domin.

To beat out their competitors, startups need to code quickly, simply, and in a language that attracts top engineers. Enter Elixir. Today we speak with Shawn Vo, Axle Payments Co-Founder and CTO, about his journey with Elixir and how it has given his company a competitive advantage. We open our conversation by exploring how Shawn got into coding while automating his work as an investment banker. After touching on why he sees programming as a superpower for adding value, he shares his growth hacks for learning a language — these range from reading old books to attending coding meetups. We then dive into Axle Payments’ business model, with Shawn highlighting the business opportunity of creating tech for industries that “people don’t think about.” A key theme in this episode, Shawn talks about how building in Elixir has helped Axle Payments hire the best engineers. We also discuss how Elixir allows them to quickly and efficiently write code that doesn’t break. Near the end of the episode, we explore Shawn’s browser extension projects and why he has a readme file to help guide people who want to work with him. Be sure to tune in to hear more insight from Shawn on the benefits of using Elixir in the startup space.

Key Points From This Episode:

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

Shawn Vo on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/shawnvo/

Special Guest: Shawn Vo.

Today we sit down with Erlanger Viktória Fördős, who talks with us about Erlang and how it is used at Cisco. We open the show by finding out about Viki’s background in coding and her unorthodox entry into the field. After hearing about her experiences in her school choir and her transition into the informatics faculty, Viki talks to us about her first experiences in coding and the thrills she found in it. She then expands on the topic, revealing how she approached people to build their websites using her newfound skills in HTML and PHP. A flash-forward later, and Viki shares details about her role as an NSO Core Engineer for Cisco. After hearing how NSO serves as a network operating system, device automation platform, and orchestration engine, Viki explains why NSO is so special. She touches on fast map-based service and some of the ways she and her team implement network-wide transactions using — you guessed it — Erlang. Viki then explains Erlang, how you should approach it if you’re a newbie, and what to expect from its biggest challenges. She elaborates on tail-recursive functions and high-level vulnerabilities concerned with SSL crypto libraries, system integrity, and atom tables. Toward the end of the show, we ask Viki to tell us about her Code BEAM presentation and about her thoughts on why academia and industry should collaborate on a more regular basis. Join us today and be treated to an enriching conversation about Erlang, as well as our secret mini-feature segment!

Key Points From This Episode:

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

Viktória Fördős - https://github.com/viktoriafordos

Special Guest: Viktória Fördős.

Today’s guest is Simon Glenn-Gregg, News Engineer at The Washington Post. He joins us to talk about using Elixir to build a prototype for a platform the news house recently implemented to visualize the results of the November 2020 elections in real-time.

While the job title of ‘News Engineer’ makes it seem like Simon invents news, this is not the case. He is focused on software related to publishing at The Washington Post, and in particular, has been working on building their election visualization platform for the past two years. Before the final iteration of the platform was built, the software engineering team at The Washington Post were given a period to test different technologies as an experiment to find the best fit, and Simon decided to try his hand at Elixir and Phoenix. He talks about what led him to this choice, and his experiences building out his prototype which he demonstrated on a dataset generated by the North Carolina 3rd Congressional District house race in September. Simon tells us about how the pitch went, what the team at The Washington Post was especially impressed by, and what led to the choice to use Node in the end.

Simon talks about the culture of openness to new technologies at The Washington Post as well as some of the limitations to their adoption. We also hear about how the final version of the visualization platform held up during the elections proper, and Simon’s plans to include Elixir in future stacks due to its amazing abilities as far as concurrency and memory. Tune in today!

Key Points From This Episode:

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

SmartLogic — https://smartlogic.io/

Special Guest: Simon Glenn-Gregg.