The culture of your programming community directly impacts your professional success. As Thunderbolt Labs Founder Randall Thomas explains in this episode, a community that practices openness and which warmly welcomes its newer members leads to greater career happiness.

We open our chat with Randall by exploring his start in coding and how he discovered Elixir. He shares some of the teething problems that he had moving from Ruby to Elixir before we touch on how learning other languages expands your ability to both appreciate and code in languages that you’re already fluent in. Following this, Randall explodes the myth of the genius polyglot programmer by sharing his take on why all coders are polyglots. As the Thunderbolt CEO, we ask Randall how his company adopted Elixir. He provides listeners with insights into how they introduced Elixir into their practice without affecting existing projects.

After highlighting the efficiency of Elixir and how community affects the feel of a language, we compare the culture and challenges of Ruby, JavaScript, and Elixir. Near the end of the episode, Randall reflects on why experts make for poor teachers. For Randall, Elixir gives his company a competitive advantage. Tune in to hear Randall’s perspective on why community matters and for his top advice on teaching your team Elixir.

Key Points From This Episode:

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

SmartLogic — https://smartlogic.io/

Special Guest: Randall Thomas.