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Today on the show we are joined by Sophie DeBenedetto from GitHub and Meryl Dakin from Frame.io to talk about the processes involved in training others and building Elixir projects. They share about studying and working together at the Flatiron School and what they do now in their respective new roles at Github and Frame.io. During their time at Flatiron, they worked on various projects, often collaborating with engineering teams from other companies and having to train these team members in Elixir. They talk about how they managed to develop new features while simultaneously onboarding new people and getting everyone on the same page. For them, the pair programming model had been most beneficial, and they discuss the habits and practices they implemented to encourage team members, optimize each learning experience, and share knowledge during training events. Sophie and Meryl also share the Elixir-specific challenges they encountered while developing applications for 2U, how Elixir’s failure-first programming capability guided them, how they prepare for training workshops, and the productivity hacks that keep them focused and energized.
Key Points From This Episode:
• How Sophie and Meryl know each other from working and studying at the Flatiron School.
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
Sophie DeBenedetto on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiedebenedetto/
Special Guests: Meryl Dakin and Sophie DeBenedetto.
In today’s episode we have one of our favorite recurring guests, Brooklyn Zelenka, joining us once again! Brooklyn has been on the show in both the first and second seasons to speak about Elixir and functional programming. In those conversations, it came up that this topic is far from exhausted, and since Season 3's theme is working with Elixir, we thought it would be great to have Brooklyn on for a third time. Today, Brooklyn does not speak to Elixir specifically though, but on functional programming more broadly. Fission, her company which is working on developing next-generation hostless apps, actually uses Haskel, but Brooklyn has a ton of experience across the board. She gives us some great insights into what makes the functional versus OOP paradigm great and helps us to understand some of the inner workings of both worlds, talking about abstraction, application, data orientation, and more. Interestingly, Brooklyn does employ some imperative programming in her company through the use of Typescript, but uses a functional style to get around the context switch. We spend some time toward the end of the show digging deeper into macros, and Brooklyn helps to revise understandings of them as code which writes more code as well as clarifies the term 'homoiconic' as it relates to ASTs. Brooklyn covers a whole lot more today so hop on for a deep dive into functional programming with today's great guest.
Key Points From This Episode:
• Why Brooklyn uses FPE: it can be reused and reasoned about.
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
SmartLogic — https://smartlogic.io/
Special Guest: Brooklyn Zelenka.
Groxio is a great platform that allows programmers to learn new languages easily and broaden their horizons. Our guests today are the team behind Groxio, Bruce and Maggie Tate! In our discussion, we cover the basics and the not so basics of what they do, from how they got into the Elixir world and founded Groxio to the conferences they run and the books they have published. We also talk about the benefits of learning multiple languages and Bruce makes a strong argument for the influence that smaller coding languages have had on his Elixir skills. Maggie and Bruce open up about having a professional and personal partnership and how they manage their marriage and businesses side by side. To finish off we hear about all the exciting things to expect at the Lonestar Conference this year and how it is going to be even better than last year's!
Key Points From This Episode:
• Bruce and Maggie's background in Elixir and how they started Groxio.
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
SmartLogic — https://smartlogic.io/
Special Guests: Bruce Tate and Maggie Tate.
On today's show, we are joined by Dan Ivovich from our team here at SmartLogic! Dan is the Director of Development Operations and has already been a guest and cohost a few times on the show. Today we are talking about hiring and training and his experience with these tasks at the company and especially concerning Elixir. We discuss the challenges Dan has faced in recruiting and the ways in which SmartLogic has lined up resumes and possible candidates through events and meetups. Dan explains some of the difficulties that are common for programmers transitioning into Elixir and how the company approaches the tasks of onboarding and ongoing support. We also get into Dan's favorite resources and tools for staying abreast of Elixir and his recommendations for practices to learn fast as a newcomer before he explains how he thinks about continual learning and expanding his own skillset. The conversation finishes with some thoughts and reflections on functional programming from our guest, so make sure to tune in for all of that and more!
Key Points From This Episode:
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
SmartLogic — https://smartlogic.io/
Special Guest: Dan Ivovich.
We are happy to be joined in this episode by Eric Meadows Jönsson, creator of the hexpm package manager, and an amazing resource who works tirelessly to build the Elixir community. Eric presently works at Brex and was part of the core team at Forza previously. In keeping with our current topic of all things working with Elixir, Eric takes a deep dive into the work he is doing to optimize various interfaces at Brex. He gives us the rundown on the static compile-time checking project he is working on, talking about his aims to build in different warnings and what we can expect from the new release in that regard. You’ll also hear about Eric’s journey learning Elixir and how he had to change his OOP mindset when he got introduced to functional programming at university. He shares the story behind hexpm and Mint, his thoughts about the future of Hex, and some of the processes around accessing the private repositories on its website. We also hear more about Eric’s hiring procedure while working at Forza, how he teaches functional programming to students at ElixirConf, and some of the major performance bottlenecks he experiences using Hex. Tap into the incredible resource that is Eric and hear more about how you can link with him online to learn further in the future by tuning in!
Key Points From This Episode:
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
SmartLogic — https://smartlogic.io/
Special Guest: Todd Resudek.
Our guest on the show today is blogger, software cowboy, and podcast host Chris Keathley. Chris is a senior engineer at Bleacher Report, co-host of Elixir Outlaws, and writer of an assemblage of open-source software. He joins us today to speak about his new projects, his journey with functional programming, and what it is like to run Bleacher Report’s infrastructure on Elixir. Chris gives us the lowdown on Norm, a data validating interface he recently completed, weighing in on how it is different from Dialyzer and what it can offer as far as scalability. We hear more about how Chris got introduced to Elixir through Haskell, why he wishes he learned Clojure sooner, and why Ruby on Rails isn’t going anywhere soon.
Chris also gets into the tradeoffs these languages make to correlate with Erlang. He argues that Elixir can only be more widely adopted if more people build cool things in it, and then lays out some of its power in supporting Bleacher Report’s user interface. We pick Chris’s brain about what his company is trying to optimize at the moment and hear about their preference for capacity over speed, and their techniques for failing gracefully during traffic spikes. Chris tells us how much he loves Elixir due to its use of ETS and other functionality which allows Bleacher Report to keep running even above capacity. Finally, we hear about some of the observability practices that Bleacher Report uses when deploying new systems and predicting future spikes. Plug in for a great conversation and hear why you should get building with Elixir now!
Key Points From This Episode:
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
SmartLogic — https://smartlogic.io/
Special Guest: Chris Keathley.
On today’s show, we welcome Justin Schneck and Frank Hunleth, luminaries from the Nerves team! We take a dive into the world of Nerves with them, covering themes of performance, problem-solving, transitioning to hardware, and breakthroughs in the field. We begin with a conversation on how Elixir handles performance issues on the range of devices they support and Frank gets into how the team solved an early boot time discrepancy between a PC and a Raspberry Pi board. Other big themes for today are ironing out the kinks in the system registry model and merging Erlang and into hard real-time. After squeezing some information out of the guys about their use of ugly code hacks we get into some visionary decisions as well as things the team wished they could have done differently at Elixir (see the release of the new networking stack). Finally, we end off with what Frank and Justin are excited about as far as developments in the Nerves community, so be sure to plug into this one!
**Key Points From This Episode:
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
Nerves Project — https://nerves-project.org/
Special Guest: Frank Hunleth.
Our theme this season is working with Elixir, and joining in the conversation today is Brad Traylor from Podium. Brad shares his expertise in hiring and training for Podium, a position he is passionate about since it gives him the opportunity to work on the people and tech side of things. We begin by hearing a bit of Brad’s background, when and how he was first introduced to Elixir and the standout qualities that attracted him to Podium. He discusses the hiring process, including what he looks for in an engineer, why they don’t recruit much but rather work with referrals, the step-by-step of onboarding new devs and the resources he recommends to anyone in the industry. Another great talk with a stand-up guy — be sure to tune in!
Key Points From This Episode:
**Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
Brad Traylor on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/bradtraylor
Special Guest: Brad Traylor.
Today on Elixir Wizards we are joined by none other than José Valim, the inventor of Elixir! Coming from the Ruby on Rails world, José found his way to functional programming and we hear all about the evolution of his philosophy and thought process around the time of the creation of the language. He gives us some great insight into why functional programming is so appealing to him and the problems he wanted to solve by creating Elixir. We chat about other languages and his use of Erlang, Elixir's three biggest influences and some important characters in the story. José also shares a bit of personal, behind the scenes stuff about his schedule and how he tries to stay as productive as possible. We finish off the chat, talking about performance and the measures José has taken in this regard. For all this and more from a true Elixir wizard, be sure to tune in!
Key Points From This Episode:
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
SmartLogic
Special Guest: José Valim.
Welcome to Elixir Wizards, today we are joined by Dr. Jim Freeze to talk about his passion for and history in Elixir and functional programming. Dr. Freeze is one of the organizers of one of our favorite things in the world, Elixir Conf! He shares his story of coming to functional programming and his early days with Elixir, what he sees as the most important aspects of the conference before diving into what is on offer for those that attend. We talk about how employers can get Elixir newcomers up to speed on the language and the most effective ways Dr. Freeze stays abreast of developments in the field. Our guest also recommends a few resources for those wanting an introduction to Elixir and makes a great argument for the usefulness of a functional approach to programming. For all this and a whole bunch more, join us today!
Key Points From This Episode:
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
Special Guest: Dr. Jim Freeze.
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