Elixir Wizards

Latest Episodes:

HTTP Requests in Elixir vs. JavaScript with Yordis Prieto & Stephen Chudleigh Oct 26, 2023

Show notes

In today’s episode, Sundi and Owen are joined by Yordis Prieto and Stephen Chudleigh to compare notes on HTTP requests in Elixir vs. Ruby, JavaScript, Go, and Rust. They cover common pain points when working with APIs, best practices, and lessons that can be learned from other programming languages.

Yordis maintains Elixir's popular Tesla HTTP client library and shares insights from building APIs and maintaining open-source projects. Stephen has experience with Rails and JavaScript, and now works primarily in Elixir. They offer perspectives on testing HTTP requests and working with different libraries.

While Elixir has matured, there is room for improvement - especially around richer struct parsing from HTTP responses. The discussion highlights ongoing efforts to improve the developer experience for HTTP clients in Elixir and other ecosystems.

Topics Discussed in this Episode

HTTP is a protocol - but each language has different implementation methods
Tesla represents requests as middleware that can be modified before sending
Testing HTTP requests can be a challenge due to dependence on outside systems
GraphQL, OpenAPI, and JSON API provide clear request/response formats
Elixir could improve richer parsing from HTTP into structs
Focus on contribution ergonomics lowers barriers for new participants
Maintainers emphasize making contributions easy via templates and clear documentation
APIs drive adoption of standards for client/server contracts
They discuss GraphQL, JSON API, OpenAPI schemas, and other standards that provide clear request/response formats
TypeScript brings types to APIs and helps to validate responses
Yordis notes that Go and Rust make requests simple via tags for mapping JSON to structs
Language collaboration shares strengths from different ecosystems and inspires new libraries and tools for improving the programming experience

Links Mentioned

Special Guests: Stephen Chudleigh and Yordis Prieto.

Season 11 Kickoff: The Hosts Discuss Branching Out from Elixir to Compare Notes Oct 19, 2023

Show notes

Hosts Dan Ivovich, Owen Bickford, and Sundi Myint kick off the 11th season of the Elixir Wizards podcast. This season’s theme is “Branching Out from Elixir,” which expands the conversation to compare notes with experts from other communities; they discuss their experiences with other languages like JavaScript, PHP, Python, Ruby, C#, Go, and Dart before and after learning Elixir.

This season's conversations will illuminate how problems are solved in different languages vs. Elixir; upcoming episode topics teased include education, data processing, deployment strategies, and garbage collection; the hosts express excitement for conversations analyzing similarities and differences between communities.

Topics Discussed in this Episode

Season 11 branches out from Elixir to compare notes with other programming communities
Sundi, Owen, and Dan introduce the season theme and their interest in exploring these conversations
The hosts compare their experiences with PHP, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, C#, Go, Dart and Elixir
The Wizards compare and contrast differences in their personal experience building similar things with different languages
Dan dreams in Ruby and uses it for quick prototypes
Comparing problem-solving approaches across languages will reframe perspectives
Upcoming episodes explore data processing workflows, machine learning, and game development
Pop Quiz: Who's that Pokémon... or language, or framework?

Links Mentioned

https://smartlogic.io/
https://codepen.io/
https://i.redd.it/0lg7979qtr511.jpg

José Valim, Guillaume Duboc, and Giuseppe Castagna on the Future of Types in Elixir Jun 08, 2023

Show notes

It’s the Season 10 finale of the Elixir Wizards podcast! José Valim, Guillaume Duboc, and Giuseppe Castagna join Wizards Owen Bickford and Dan Ivovich to dive into the prospect of types in the Elixir programming language! They break down their research on set-theoretical typing and highlight their goal of creating a type system that supports as many Elixir idioms as possible while balancing simplicity and pragmatism.

José, Guillaume, and Giuseppe talk about what initially sparked this project, the challenges in bringing types to Elixir, and the benefits that the Elixir community can expect from this exciting work. Guillaume's formalization and Giuseppe's "cutting-edge research" balance José's pragmatism and "Guardian of Orthodoxy" role. Decades of theory meet the needs of a living language, with open challenges like multi-process typing ahead. They come together with a shared joy of problem-solving that will accelerate Elixir's continued growth.

Key Topics Discussed in this Episode:

Adding type safety to Elixir through set theoretical typing
How the team chose a type system that supports as many Elixir idioms as possible
Balancing simplicity and pragmatism in type system design
Addressing challenges like typing maps, pattern matching, and guards
The tradeoffs between Dialyzer and making types part of the core language
Advantages of typing for catching bugs, documentation, and tooling
The differences between typing in the Gleam programming language vs. Elixir
The possibility of type inference in a set-theoretic type system
The history and development of set-theoretic types over 20 years
Gradual typing techniques for integrating typed and untyped code
How José and Giuseppe initially connected through research papers
Using types as a form of "mechanized documentation"
The risks and tradeoffs of choosing syntax
Cheers to another decade of Elixir!
A big thanks to this season’s guests and all the listeners!

Links and Resources Mentioned in this Episode:

Bringing Types to Elixir | Guillaume Duboc & Giuseppe Castagna | ElixirConf EU 2023
Keynote: Celebrating the 10 Years of Elixir | José Valim | ElixirConf EU 2022
OCaml industrial-strength functional programming https://ocaml.org/
ℂDuce: a language for transformation of XML documents http://www.cduce.org/
Ballerina coding language https://ballerina.io/
Luau coding language https://luau-lang.org/
Gleam type language https://gleam.run/
"The Design Principles of the Elixir Type System" by G. Castagna, G. Duboc, and J. Valim
"A Gradual Type System for Elixir" by M. Cassola, A. Talagorria, A. Pardo, and M. Viera
"Programming with union, intersection, and negation types", by Giuseppe Castagna
"Covariance and Contravariance: a fresh look at an old issue (a primer in advanced type systems for learning functional programmers)" by Giuseppe Castagna
"A reckless introduction to Hindley-Milner type inference"

Special Guests: Giuseppe Castagna, Guillaume Duboc, and José Valim.

Chris McCord and Jason Stiebs on the Future of Phoenix Jun 01, 2023

Show notes

Phoenix core team members Chris McCord and Jason Stiebs join Elixir Wizards Sundi Myint and Owen Bickford the growth of Phoenix and LiveView, the latest updates, and what they're excited to see in the future. They express excitement for the possibilities of machine learning, AI, and distributed systems and how these emerging technologies will enhance the user experience of Elixir and LiveView applications in the next decade.

Key Topics Discussed in this Episode:

How community contributions and feedback help improve Phoenix LiveView
The addition of function components, declarative assigns, HEEx, and streams
Why Ecto changesets should be used as "fire and forget" data structures
Excitement about machine learning and AI with libraries like NX
The possibility of distributed systems and actors in the future
Verifying and solving issues in the Phoenix and LiveView issue trackers
Why marketing plays a part in the adoption and mindshare of Phoenix
How streams provide a primitive for arbitrarily large dynamic lists
Elixir VM's ability to scale to millions of connections
A creative use of form inputs for associations with dynamic children

Links Mentioned in this Episode:

Fly Site https://fly.io/
Keynote: The Road To LiveView 1.0 by Chris McCord | ElixirConf EU 2023
Keynote: I Was Wrong About LiveView by Jason Stiebs | ElixirConf 2022
Phoenix Site https://www.phoenixframework.org/
Phoenix Github https://github.com/phoenixframework
Two-Story, 10-Room Purple Martin House
Blog: The Road to 2 Million Websocket Connections in Phoenix
Raxx Elixir Webserver Interface https://hexdocs.pm/raxx/0.4.1/readme.html
Livebook Site https://livebook.dev/
Sundi’s 6’x 6’ Phoenix painting
Surface on Hex https://hex.pm/packages/surface
Axon Deep Learning Framework https://hexdocs.pm/axon/Axon.html
Nx Numerical Elixir https://hexdocs.pm/nx/intro-to-nx.html
Phoenix PubSub https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix_pubsub/Phoenix.PubSub.html
Jason Stiebs on Twitter https://twitter.com/peregrine
Jason Stiebs on Mastodon https://merveilles.town/@peregrine

Special Guests: Chris McCord and Jason Stiebs.

Sean Moriarity on the Future of Machine Learning with Elixir May 25, 2023

Show notes

Sean Moriarity, author of Genetic Algorithms in Elixir and creator of the Axon Library, joins Elixir Wizards Sundi Myint and Bilal Hankins to discuss Elixir’s role in the future of machine learning and AI. He explains the difference between artificial intelligence, chat models, machine learning, deep learning systems, and neural networks.

Large language models have great potential for code generation, education tools, streamlining workflow, and more. Deployment, development experience, and real-time processing make Elixir an ideal programming language for creating and improving machine learning tools.

Key Topics Discussed in this Episode:

The difference between machine learning and artificial intelligence
How Axon builds on top of the Nx library for deep learning in Elixir
Why logic cannot fully define characteristics that identify golden retrievers
How Google Translate uses machine learning with a unified language model
The difficulties in translating concepts with no direct counterpart between languages
Data cleaning and labeling challenges
How Sean's interest in sports betting led to exploring machine learning
Why Sean's NBA betting model recommended betting $0 to maximize profit
Getting started with machine learning and Elixir projects
Attention mechanisms in neural networks
Bias and exceptions in machine translation models
How hummus preference was used to determine Sundi's Hogwarts house
Sean's work on a LiveView interface for ChatGPT
Why Elixir's deployment story, development experience, and real-time processing are good fits for machine learning applications

Links Mentioned:

Genetic Algorithms in Elixir by Sean Moriarity: https://pragprog.com/titles/smgaelixir/genetic-algorithms-in-elixir/
Axon Deep Learning in Elixir: https://seanmoriarity.com/2021/04/08/axon-deep-learning-in-elixir/
Nx Axon: https://github.com/elixir-nx/axon
Sean’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/sean_moriarity
Weston the Golden’s IG: https://www.instagram.com/westonthegolden_/
Sean’s Github: https://github.com/seanmor5
Bumblebee: https://github.com/elixir-nx/bumblebee
Sal Khan’s TedTalk about AI in Education: https://www.ted.com/talks/sal_khan_how_ai_could_save_not_destroy_education/c
Publicly Available Datasets/Intro to Machine Learning: https://www.kaggle.com/
Use code WIZARD for $100 off your ticket to Empex NYC in Brooklyn, NY on June 9, 2023 https://ti.to/empex-ny/empex-nyc-2023

Special Guest: Sean Moriarity.

Hugo Baraúna & Lucas San Roman on the Future of the Elixir Community May 18, 2023

Show notes

In this episode of the Elixir Wizards podcast, hosts Sundi Myint and Owen Bickford are joined by Hugo Baraúna, founder at Elixir Radar, and Lucas San Roman, senior software engineer at Felt. We dive into the future of the Elixir community, how we stay connected, and the remarkable culture that has developed over the past decade.

Key highlights in this episode:

The Elixir community's warm and inviting atmosphere
Commitment to long-term stability and innovation in the Elixir community
How projects like Nerves, Phoenix LiveView, and Livebook expand Elixir's capabilities
Global connections and support among Elixirists via Slack and Discord
The Elixir Radar newsletter provides up-to-date Elixir news and community developments
Getting “nerd sniped” by the community
Hugo Baraúna's motivation behind Elixir Radar and its impact on the tech industry
Networking opportunities and relationship-building within the community
Lucas San Roman's commitment to giving back with the Sourcerer Library
Plans for more advanced collaboration in Livebook with the new Teams feature
The potential introduction of a type system in Elixir

Links mentioned in this episode:

Elixir Radar: https://elixir-radar.com/
Felt: https://felt.com/
Ruby Weekly: https://rubyweekly.com/
The Elixir Discord Server: https://discord.com/invite/elixir
Code Fragment: https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/Code.Fragment.html
The Sourcerer Library: https://github.com/doorgan/sourceror
Livebook: https://livebook.dev/
Lucas’ Blog: https://dorgan.ar/
Hugo’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/hugobarauna
Elixir Radar on Twitter: https://twitter.com/elixir_radar
Livebook on Twitter: https://twitter.com/livebookdev
Lucas’ Twitter https://twitter.com/dorgan_
Guillaume Duboc Bringing Types to Elixir at ElixirConf EU 2023
Lucas on GitHub: https://github.com/doorgan
Rooster Fighter on Easter Island
Rooster Fighter at Iguazu Falls in Argentina

Use code WIZARD for $100 off your ticket to Empex NYC in Brooklyn, NY on June 9, 2023

Special Guests: Hugo Baraúna and Lucas San Roman.

José Valim on the Future of the Elixir Ecosystem May 11, 2023

Show notes

Today on Elixir Wizards, José Valim, creator of the Elixir programming language, joins hosts Sundi Myint and Owen Bickford to discuss the future of Elixir, upcoming features, changes to the language and ecosystem, and the potential for a type system.

José discusses how Elixir’s extensibility allows the ecosystem to grow with new tools and libraries, all while requiring few languages to the core language.

Key Takeaways:

The origin of the famous rainbow heart combo
José’s hands-off approach to planning the ecosystem which allows community contribution without reliance on the core team
The success and growth of the Elixir community
Lessons learned in the first ten years of the language
The evolution of Elixir's documentation and the role of Livebook in creating more interactive and engaging learning experiences
The potential for Elixir Nx to make numerical computation, machine learning, and data science more accessible to Elixir developers
Potential implementation of a gradual type system and the importance of backwards compatibility
The role of the Elixir community in shaping the language's development and ecosystem, including the importance of open-source contributions
Whether we’ll see Elixir 2.0 in the next decade

Links mentioned in this episode:

Josė Valim Keynote ElixirConf EU Bringing Elixir to Life
Dashbit - https://dashbit.co/
Elixir programming language: https://elixir-lang.org/
ElixirConf: https://elixirconf.com/
ElixirForum: https://elixirforum.com/
Elixir's Logger library: https://hexdocs.pm/logger/Logger.html
José's Twitter: https://twitter.com/josevalim
ElixirLS (Elixir Language Server) https://github.com/elixir-lsp/elixir-ls
Mermaid Charts in Livebook - https://news.livebook.dev/date/2022/1
IEx - https://hexdocs.pm/iex/1.14/IEx.html
Numerical Elixir - Nx: https://hexdocs.pm/nx/getting-started.html
Nerves: https://hexdocs.pm/nerves/getting-started.html
Membrane: https://hexdocs.pm/membrane/getting-started.html
Dialyxir: https://hexdocs.pm/dialyxir/readme.html
LiveBook: https://hexdocs.pm/livebook/getting-started.html
Bumblebee: https://github.com/elixir-nx/bumblebee

Special Guest: José Valim.

Saša Jurić on The Future of Training & Education in Elixir May 04, 2023

Show notes

Today on Elixir Wizards, Sundi Myint and Owen Bickford are joined by Saša Jurić, distinguished developer, mentor, and author of Elixir in Action. They discuss the future of training and education in Elixir, challenges faced by new Elixir developers, Phoenix generators, peer mentorship, the emergence of types, and when it’s time to close the umbrella.

Key Takeaways:

The functional programming paradigm, the actor model, and concurrency
Adapting to the Elixir syntax and tooling
The role of community, mentorship, and continuous learning in Elixir education
The pros and cons of Phoenix generators for Elixir development
Customizing templates in the Phoenix priv directory to better suit individual needs
The importance of understanding and adapting generated code for maintainability and proper abstractions
Importance of having a clear separation between core and interface
Adapting to different opinions and preferences within a development team
Refactoring and restructuring code to improve quality and reduce complexity
Static typing for better documentation and the limitations of dynamic code
Umbrella apps vs. mix configuration and how to avoid complexity

Links Mentioned in this Episode:

Enter to win a copy of Elixir in Action: https://smr.tl/2023bookgiveaway

Elixir in Action by Saša Jurić https://www.manning.com/books/elixir-in-action
35% discount code for book on manning.com: podexwizards20

Saša’s Website/Blog TheErlangelist.com
Towards Maintainable Elixir - Saša Jurić's Medium Blog Article Series
Boundary: Managing cross-module dependencies in Elixir projects
Site Encrypt: Integrated Certification via Let's Encrypt for Elixir-powered sites

Authentication Generator in Phoenix: https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/mix_phx_gen_auth.html
Ecto query generator for Elixir https://hexdocs.pm/ecto/Ecto.html
GraphQL: Query language for APIs https://graphql.org/
Dialyxir: https://hexdocs.pm/dialyxir/readme.html
Nx (Numerical Elixir) GitHub Repository: https://github.com/elixir-nx/nx
ElixirLS (Elixir Language Server) GitHub Repository: https://github.com/elixir-lsp/elixir-ls

Special Guest: Saša Jurić.

Mat Trudel on the Future of Phoenix and Web Transports Apr 27, 2023

Show notes

In this episode of Elixir Wizards, Owen and Dan talk to Mat Trudel, Phoenix contributor and creator of the Bandit Web Server, about the future of Phoenix, web transports, and HTTP/3. Mat explains the challenges and benefits of implementing HTTP/3 support in Phoenix.

Mat provides in-depth insights into the evolution of web protocols and encourages developers to continue pushing the boundaries of web development and to contribute to the growth of the open-source community.

Main topics discussed in this episode:

The evolution of web protocols and how HTTP/3 is changing the landscape
The challenges and benefits of implementing HTTP/3 support in Phoenix
How a home AC project revealed a gap in web server testing tools and inspired Bandit
how web transports like Cowboy and Ranch are used to build scalable web servers
WebSock for multiplexing data over a single WebSocket connection
Mat’s philosophy on naming projects and his passion for malapropisms
The Bandit project and how it can help developers better understand web protocols
Autobahn, a testing suite for WebSocket protocol specification conformance
The importance of community involvement in open-source projects
Encouragement for more people to use Bandit and report bugs

Links Mentioned:

SmartLogic is Hiring: https://smartlogic.io/about/jobs
PagerDuty: https://www.pagerduty.com
Phoenix Framework: https://www.phoenixframework.org/
Cowboy: https://ninenines.eu/docs/en/cowboy/2.9/guide/introduction/
Ranch: https://github.com/ninenines/ranch
Bandit - https://hexdocs.pm/bandit/Bandit.html
Autobahn: https://github.com/crossbario/autobahn-testsuite
HTTP Cats: https://http.cat/
Mat Trudel at Empex 2022 A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Phoenix
Thousand Island - https://hexdocs.pm/thousand_island/ThousandIsland.html

Special Guest: Mat Trudel.

Mike Waud and Tony Winn on the Future of Elixir on the Grid Apr 20, 2023

Show notes

Elixir Wizards Owen Bickford and Dan Ivovich are joined by Mike Waud, Senior Software Engineer at SparkMeter, and Tony Winn, Lead Software Architect at Generac, to discuss the future of the BEAM in the electric grid, how their companies use Elixir, and the challenges they face in implementing cutting-edge technologies in an environment with a mix of old and new systems.

Both guests have backgrounds in various programming languages before turning to Elixir for its functional programming capabilities, concurrency, and reliability. Elixir's portability allows it to be used in various environments, from cloud-based systems to more conservative organizations that prefer running software off the cloud.

Key topics discussed in this episode:

• Technology sophistication varies across different regions and industries
• BEAM's reliability, concurrency, and scaling in electric grid systems
• Using Elixir for caching, telemetry, and managing traffic spikes
• Elixir fits well for devices due to its fault tolerance and supervision trees
• Observability with telemetry hooks for understanding system performance
• Traffic patterns in the grid space are often dictated by weather and human activity, requiring efficient handling
• The balance between using Elixir/BEAM and other tools depending on use case
• Using Elixir tools like Broadway to work with event queues and Nebulex for distributed caching
• The future of the electric grid and its evolution over the next 10 years, including a shift towards more distributed energy generation
• Global lessons about grid management, solar penetration, regulations, and energy storage
• Prioritizing data in IoT systems and processing data at the edge of the network
• Gratitude for open-source contributors in the Elixir community

Links in this episode:

SparkMeter: https://www.sparkmeter.io/
Generac: https://www.generac.com/
SmartLogic - https://smartlogic.io/jobs
Gary Bernhardt's talk on functional core and imperative shell: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/boundaries
Joe Armstrong's Erlang book: https://pragprog.com/titles/jaerlang/programming-erlang/
The Nerves podcast and documentation: https://nerves-project.org/

Special Guests: Mike Waud and Tony Winn.