We talk with Elixir Core Team Member Aleksei Magusev about how he got involved in Elixir, what it’s like being on the Core Team, some of his contributions, areas in Elixir that interest him, and his tips for learning a new programming language! He also shares some of his interests outside of computing. Meet Aleksei!

Show Notes online – https://thinkingelixir.com/podcast-episodes/065-meet-core-team-member-aleksei-magusev

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We talk with Bram Verburg about an important root certificate expiring at the end of September and how this impacts your Elixir and Erlang projects! Bram helps explain where this IS and IS NOT a problem. He also explains the different update options available. We also get Bram’s security perspectives from his years of focused study and contributions in the Elixir and Erlang communities. A great resource for understanding the current certificate situation and for protecting your Elixir projects!

Show Notes online – https://thinkingelixir.com/podcast-episodes/064-otp-certificate-woes-with-bram-verburg

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We talk with Peter Ullrich about his experience sending SMS messages from a Raspberry Pi Zero using Nerves. We cover what went well, what didn’t and get a glimpse into the current state of Nerves for a newbie when dealing with hardware. Peter also tried Livebook for Nerves and had a great experience with that. We discuss the challenges of hardware systems dealing with the “real world” but see how Elixir makes the process easier to model and think about.

Show Notes online – https://thinkingelixir.com/podcast-episodes/063-sms-texting-in-nerves-with-peter-ullrich

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We talk with Chris McCord about his recent announcement that he’s moved to work at Fly.io! We cover what this means for the Phoenix project and ongoing Phoenix development work. He shares why he’s excited about the Fly platform which includes how it replaces his need for a CDN! We also talk about the new Phoenix 1.6 release and all the goodness coming there. This release includes the HEEX engine for validated HTML at compile time, making the auth generators official, a new mailer generator, and the move away from Webpack to esbuild. We go deeper on what the move to esbuild means for existing projects before hearing where Chris wants to put his focus next. We covered a lot, so buckle up!

Show Notes online – https://thinkingelixir.com/podcast-episodes/062-chris-mccord-joins-fly-io-and-phoenix-1-6

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We cover the news then talk about the Brex announcement that they are shifting to a Kotlin-first strategy over Elixir. This reminds us of patterns we’ve seen in our careers and we reflect on what it means to us personally and professionally. We share our perspectives on Elixir, how it’s different from the languages we’ve used before and the unique value we get from it.

Show Notes online – https://thinkingelixir.com/podcast-episodes/061-elixirs-recent-brex-it

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We talk with Marc-André Lafortune about reducing Elixir project compile times. On larger projects, when a single file like a view template is changed and over 100 files get recompiled, there is something wrong. Marc-André explains how he identified the problems in his project and contributed to Elixir’s mix xref tool making it easier for us to find those problems in our own projects! We cover how these tooling improvements were used to improve the upcoming Phoenix 1.6 and Elixir 1.13! An additional mix xref flag was added to run CI checks on our code to prevent accidentally adding code that slows our compile times.

Show Notes online – https://thinkingelixir.com/podcast-episodes/060-compile-faster-with-marc-andre-lafortune

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We talk with Joel Kemp about his experience introducing Elixir at Spotify. We learn about the concurrency problems he had with the default stack and how that was solved with the BEAM. We talk about the inertia that larger companies have that make introducing any change harder. Joel compares the process to running a marathon and shares some tactics used to help build internal support and interest. Fascinating insight into a well known company and how Elixir is helping internally.

Show Notes online – https://thinkingelixir.com/podcast-episodes/059-how-elixir-came-to-spotify-with-joel-kemp

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After covering the news we catch up on what Elixir things we’ve been thinking about and working on. Mark brings up using Livebook as a Business Intelligence tool for doing analysis of a running application’s data. David brings up how to design safe data migrations in Elixir systems, examples from the Rails ecosystem and how he’s thinking about that for Elixir.

Show Notes online – https://thinkingelixir.com/podcast-episodes/058-news-and-livebook-for-business-intelligence

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We sat down with co-host Cade Ward to hear how he and his team tackled a problem of hosting live web chats with crowds of 120K+ users coming together for live events. On the show, we have talked with a couple guests with similar bursting high-load situations. Cade had been through it too so it was time to dig in and cover how this situation can be solved. We cover the different attempts and temporary solutions used and the final solution that has been working really well. In fact it works so well, during a recent event, the auto-scaling didn’t kick in and everything was still fine!

Show Notes online – https://thinkingelixir.com/podcast-episodes/057-scaling-live-chat-with-cade-ward

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We talk with Kurt Mackey, founder at Fly.io, about what makes the Fly platform unique and why hosting Elixir applications there makes a lot of sense. They started out looking to make a better CDN for developers and this pushed them to try deploying Full Stack applications closer to users, not just the static assets! We learn about the tech behind the networking, how databases can be moved closer to users, and how LiveView is even more awesome when it is close to users. Kurt also shares what he sees as the future for databases as the industry continues to move into globally distributed applications.

Show Notes online – https://thinkingelixir.com/podcast-episodes/056-fly-ing-elixir-close-to-users-with-kurt-mackey

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