Elixir Outlaws is an informal discussion about interesting things happening in Elixir. Our goal is to capture the spirit of a conference hallway discussion in a podcast.
Episode 105: Sports of Sorts
The Elixir Outlaws now have a Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/user?u=5332239). If you’re enjoying the show then please consider throwing a few bucks our way to help us pay for the costs for the show. On today’s episode of the Elixir Outlaws, Sean Cribbs and Amos King are going to talk about Sports of Sorts. Amos shares some driving wisdom and his fondness for silent thoughts. Sean and Amos will share some random and interesting experiences. Episode Highlights: Amos reveals how he developed his creativity and problem-solving skills from driving. Sean has recently resigned from his job, and he is about to join a new company after 12 days. As per Sean, one spends a lot of your time sleeping because their dreams help them to work through problems Amos loves jogging around the river next to the hotel early in the morning when nobody is up. For him, it is nice and quiet. Brittany Matthews is a co-owner of the women's soccer team. She has been big in promoting women’s sports in Kansas City, but especially soccer, and Patrick and Brittany broke ground on a new training center earlier this year. Then, three or four weeks ago, they revealed their new team name. The stadium is first of its kind for the women’s soccer team, which is huge because this team has only been here a year. They just announced that they were going to have a team this January 2021. For those not in Kansas City, the streetcar is absolutely free , which is really awesome with all the buses because buses are free too. So you can go anywhere for free in Kansas City. We have one of the best women soccer players in Samuels who has been on the national team. An Incredible midfielder, dynamic player, and she is going be exciting to watch, says Sean. While talking about the new company where Sean is going to join. He explains that the company is doing motion graphics or motion design. People really want the ability to collaborate to provide feedback on designs, work on different iterations, compare them, and build out a portfolio for you, says Sean. There are multiple companies out there called Fable, so if you want to go look it up, it is Fable, not Fable dot IO, not fable com. It is the Fable Dot app. It is one of those easy, easy ones to find. Amos says he doesn’t know how possible it would be, but it would be interesting if, two designers could work on the same like image or animation at the same time, doing the same kind of ideas of passing changes back and forth. Part of the reason why Sean’s friend wanted to hire him is because he has distributed systems experience, where all the bodies are buried, where all the problems are gonna be like what if we want to have real time collaboration or like something like Miro where people are dragging things around on the on the project at the same time. What always kills me on the front end in the browser, or even if you are compiling and making things faster, is that you really have zero control over the quality of the computer it is running on and the problems like the interactions between the things, says Amos. Sean says that they are going to write C+ code because it was mostly C code, but using the C ++compiler and very few features of C and like the Windows API and like working with it directly to build a 2D kind of Zelda light game. Sean says that the JavaScript community is huge. You have a lot of people experience in JavaScript. It doesn’t take that many of them to make a good customization. Amos shares that his first editor for code other than the QBasic editor was Emacs and that was 22 years ago. Amos says that his first experience with C not running everywhere was in an AI class and they had to write a chess engine and then they all played the developed chess engines against each other. Sean says there is a bytecode format that you can take from running on a Intel being VM and run it on an ARM beam VM or on some other processor that is running your nerves project. 3 Key Points Those of you who don’t know anything about Kansas City, but Patrick Mahomes is a big deal here quarterback for the Chiefs and his fiance Brittany Matthews is kind of influential in her own. Sean says that Figma has changed the way people do collaborate on static web design, this is going to be collaboration on motion design. Motion design would include things like just regular animations you might see on the web. It could include things like advertisements, logo, animations. There are a lot of different ways that we could do collaborate. Another area that he talked about us wanting to do is so a lot of this is like you do in the browser, You draw your shapes, you animate them you set the keyframes, you know you set all that stuff up. But that only produces us a level of quality that the browser can produce. But if you want to do 4K video of this animation that you just created, you are not going to produce that with your browser, says Sean. Tweetable Quotes “I am a big fan of silent thoughts” – Sean “When they introduce the team that the players that are going to start for the match. They had some incredible motion designs on the video board.“- Sean “It is not movies, it is more about the animation than about video editing. It is like making an animated logo.” - Sean “There are some pretty interesting problems how to isolate yourself from these, they are doing something very quick and then suddenly they open another program on their desktop, but that hangup.” – Amos “90% of your life was spent formatting exactly how that professor wanted it formatted, which is like a huge waste of time.” - Amos Resources Mentioned: Podcast Editing Elixir Outlaws: Website
Episode 104: Hot Pockets and Refresh Buttons
The Elixir Outlaws now have a Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/user?u=5332239). If you’re enjoying the show then please consider throwing a few bucks our way to help us pay for the costs for the show. On today’s episode of the Elixir Outlaws, Sean Cribbs and Amos King are going to talk about the Elixir Conference. Amos talks about his ordeal to reach the Elixir Conference, his flight continuously got canceled, and the entire journey was hectic for him. From the scariest landing to nonstop flights getting canceled, rescheduled, and re-routed, Sean’s travel ordeal covers all. Episode Highlights: Amos gives detailed insights about his talk and pre-preparation. He has a habit of continuously improving his speech and slides, and this is precisely what he did when he got the extra time due to flight cancellations and re-routing. Amos received a lot of positive feedback, and he had a wonderful experience at the conference. For him, it was nice to be around people again post-pandemic. Amos suggests before giving a speech, and you don’t have to write out the entire talk, write notes for things that you need to say in a specific way. Sean talks about a funny incident that happened in QCON 2014, and he explains why he has a meme and a Russian Fake Facebook account. While giving a talk at the vendor track at QCON, which is a big industry very expensive enterprise technology conference type thing, Sean made a funny posture with his hands. At the QCON, the photographers have a talent for catching speakers with their hands and really interesting and kind of disturbing positions. Sean tried hard not to make any postures, but the photographer still got a funny picture that later got circulated as a meme. Amos explains how nerves are set up; you can use nerves to deploy to your servers if you want to. Because you just have to have something that can run Linux. So now you have B partitions that automatically swap over if one fails. So you can use the nerves hub to deploy to your servers. You just have to build a nerves image for whatever server you have. Sean and Amos explain how you can accomplish really great things when your tools are well built. Amos says there have been a lot of things that the nerves team and working on nerves has brought back to the ecosystem as a whole. Sean feels that there is a lot of good stuff going right now, but there is also a long way to go before you can really feel like, hey, this out of the box or very close to out of the box new Elixir project, it is going to have metrics tracing, logging, built in. So, Sean feels that he just has to add his own flavor for this particular project and make that part of his engineering process. Sean talks about a crypto finance company and one of its major functions, i.e., trading. Sean explains how there are multiple systems within an infrastructure that interacts as part of the process. As soon as you know your product is viable, you get feedback to give users better experiences, says Amos. Sean explains how one can directly correlate to the cost of the server, and one can save memory. Talking about his side projects, Sean said his project capacity planner became one of his major projects. Sometimes you just have to turn people away in order to serve anyone, says Sean. There are a bunch of products without the sort of visibility to their customers even those products do not have value or not apparent value like the content distribution networks (CDN). While talking about passing the acceptance test, Sean says to Amos that you can build these kinds of things that look like single-page apps, but they are completely server-side driven, and you can manage this state and Elixir, and that is great. 3 Key Points 1. Amos says that at the conference, they mainly talked about whenever you are doing acceptance tests driver browser or really any system that you have to wait for things like transitions so that as a user, you might not think about. 2. Amos talks about his coding journey and how he learned the basics of programming. 3. Sean explains how virtuous feedback cycles make your business successful in addition to your technical side. Tweetable Quotes “You should not take more food than you can eat, but you also don’t have to eat everything like don’t make yourself miserable. It’s not good for your health.” – Amos “Computer is often faster than what the dropdown will actually open in the browser so.” – Sean Cribbs “The very first code that I traded run was also the most complicated.” – Amos “If you learn with small talk, you’re probably in the right place.” – Amos “Categorically deploying Elixir does not exist.”- Amos “If people know how to measure their systems, then they can get in a situation where they fire up 96 of the largest instances on their cloud provider and don’t care about the cost.” – Sean Resources Mentioned: Podcast Editing
Episode 103: Welcome back Anna
Anna, Sean, and Amos talk about what they do to take a break, and follow it up with how to get started on hard problems when there is no clear path forward. The Elixir Outlaws now have a Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/user?u=5332239). If you’re enjoying the show then please consider throwing a few bucks our way to help us pay for the costs for the show.
Episode 102: Who's that host? It's Sean.
How do we get started? How does context affect the software we write? The Elixir Outlaws now have a Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/user?u=5332239). If you’re enjoying the show then please consider throwing a few bucks our way to help us pay for the costs for the show.
Episode 101: Bright and Tight
This week, Chris and Amos discuss error handling and when its appropriate to "Let It Crash" :tm:. A transcript for this episode is available on Binary Noggin's website: https://binarynoggin.com/blog/episode-101-bright-and-tight/
Episode 100: Pop-Tartare
This week our hosts celebrate their 100th episode. The talk about their favorite moments from the show. A transcript of this episode can be found on Binary Noggin's website: https://binarynoggin.com/blog/episode-100-pop-tartare/
Episode 99: Big Tubes
The main topic this week is behaviours and protocols and when to use both. Chris, inspired by the wisdom of Quinn Wilton, thinks that its probably incorrect to use Behaviours to define public interfaces for APIs. Protocols seem to fit the bill better. Both hosts agree that the best kind of dependency injection is just called, "passing arguments to functions". A transcript is available for this episode on Binary Noggin's website: https://binarynoggin.com/blog/episode-99-big-tubes/
Episode 98: Machine Laundering
This week, Chris, Amos, and Anna talk about conferences, strange loop, and how hard re-entering the real world has been. But, the main topic is copilot. Surprising absolutely no one, everyone has strong opinions. A transcript of this episode is available on Binary Noggin's website: https://binarynoggin.com/blog/episode-98-machine-laundering/
Episode 97: Successfully Vamped
This weeks show kicks off with discussion on Ecto. Amos claims that Chris made some bold statements about relations which Chris fervently denies. The topic eventually shifts to Chris's recent blog post on writing more maintainable elixir code. Transcript is available on Binary Noggin's website: https://binarynoggin.com/blog/episode-97-successfully-vamped/
Episode 96: Stuck between two ETS Tables and a GenServer
This week kicks off with a discussion on ETS tables and the various ways that they can be used. Chris talks about his experience utilizing ETS tables at Bleacher Report in order to optimize some of their critical paths and build reliability. The conversation then shifts into the various tools and techniques that Bleacher Report utilized to build resilient services. A transcript is available for this episode on Binary Noggin's website: https://binarynoggin.com/blog/episode-96-stuck-between-two-ets-tables-and-a-genserver/
Episode 95: Outlaws Live at ElixirConfAfr
This week, the hosts are hanging out at ElixirConf Africa. They discuss improvements to Elixir, community building, and ways that the Elixir community can continue to improve. A transcript is available for this episode on Binary Noggin's website: https://binarynoggin.com/blog/episode-95-elixir-conf-africa-2021/ Special Guests: Collins Mucheru, Shuaib Afegubua, and Sigu Magwa.
Episode 93: The story of the code
Chris has started a new job at frame.io, and he's just getting settled in. Amos has questions and Chris describes his process for learning the history of a code base as quickly as possible. A transcript is available for this episode on Binary Noggin's website: https://binarynoggin.com/blog/episode-93-the-story-of-the-code/
Episode 92: Outlaws Live at CodeBeam
This week the outlaws are live at CodeBeam and are shucking, jiving, and some combination of the two. They're also answering questions from the community. A transcript is available for this episode on Binary Noggin's website: https://binarynoggin.com/blog/episode-92-outlaws-live-at-code-beam-v/
Episode 91: I Promise Not to Take Your Cows
Amos, Anna, and Chris start off the show discussing the morality of making promises you can't keep, then spend the rest of the episode discussing the ups and downs of past conference talks. A transcript is available for this episode on Binary Noggin's website: https://binarynoggin.com/blog/episode-91-i-promise-not-to-take-your-cows/ The Elixir Outlaws now have a Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/user?u=5332239). If you’re enjoying the show then please consider throwing a few bucks our way to help us pay for the costs for the show.
Episode 90: Ad Hoc-ly Specified
After confirming that there is indeed a Kansas City, Missouri, the Outlaws discuss Amos's new projects using Phoenix and some LiveView, then opine about CSS, Wallaby, and testing, before closing with brief commentary on Nyx. Shout outs to Friends of The Show : Frank Herbert and Mitch Hanberg. https://www.mitchellhanberg.com/projects/ https://twitter.com/mononcqc A transcript is available for this episode on Binary Noggin's website: https://binarynoggin.com/blog/episode-90-ad-hoc-ly-specified/ The Elixir Outlaws now have a Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/user?u=5332239). If you’re enjoying the show then please consider throwing a few bucks our way to help us pay for the costs for the show.