Thinking Elixir Podcast

News and interviews for the Elixir community

About the show

The Thinking Elixir podcast is a weekly show where we talk about the Elixir programming language and the community around it. We cover news and interview guests to learn more about projects and developments in the community.

Whether you are already experienced with Elixir or just exploring the language, this show is created with you in mind. We discuss community news, Functional Programming, transitioning from OOP, coding conventions, and more.

Guests visit the show to help challenge our assumptions, learn about new developments and grow in the process.

Subscribe to join us on this journey!

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Episodes

  • 61: Elixir's Recent Brex-it

    August 24th, 2021  |  30 mins 32 secs

    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.

  • 60: Compile Faster with Marc-André Lafortune

    August 17th, 2021  |  43 mins 2 secs

    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.

  • 59: How Elixir Came to Spotify with Joel Kemp

    August 10th, 2021  |  43 mins 5 secs

    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 intro...

  • 58: News and Livebook for Business Intelligence

    August 3rd, 2021  |  21 mins 25 secs

    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.

  • 57: Scaling Live Chat with Cade Ward

    July 27th, 2021  |  57 mins 19 secs

    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 situ...

  • 56: Fly-ing Elixir Close to Users with Kurt Mackey

    July 13th, 2021  |  59 mins 32 secs

    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 Ful...

  • 55: Learning from Failure with Philipp Schmieder

    July 6th, 2021  |  37 mins 23 secs

    We talk with Philipp Schmieder about his experience creating a LiveView application for a political party’s convention and then watching the app blow up. We learn how he recovered, why it failed, and how he fixed it going forward.

  • 54: AST Parsing using Sourceror with Lucas San Román

    June 29th, 2021  |  53 mins 39 secs

    We talk with Lucas San Román about his library Sourceror and how it was created to solve some AST parsing limitations. The Elixir parser discards code comments, so it can’t be used for re-writing Elixir code when refactoring.

  • 53: SOLID Elixir with Ilya Averyanov

    June 22nd, 2021  |  35 mins 49 secs

    We talk with Ilya Averyanov about how the SOLID principles, typically associated with OOP, can apply to Elixir. We talk about Ilya's blog post where he applied these principles to his Github project and how that helped in PR discussions.

  • 52: IOList and Postgres with Nathan Long

    June 15th, 2021  |  49 mins 37 secs

    We take a deeper dive with Nathan Long into IOLists in Elixir. We cover what they are, how they work, the power they have when concatenating strings, and how they are used in Phoenix and Logger. We even talk about improper lists and why they exist.

  • 51: Live Auctions with Alex Loukissas

    June 8th, 2021  |  41 mins 6 secs

    We talk with Alex Loukissas about using Phoenix sockets to provide live auction systems. We comment on the situation of flash-mob-like users coming to a system and needing to handle high traffic volumes for shorter durations.

  • 50: Exercism.io and Elixir with Angelika Tyborska

    June 1st, 2021  |  54 mins 26 secs

    We talk with Angelika Tyborska about the history of exercism.io, her involvement, the issues addressed in v2 and what's new and cool in the soon to be released v3. We cover the Elixir track, her work as a maintainer,