Welcome back to Elixir Wizards, season five, episode one! The theme for this season is ‘Adopting Elixir’, and for today’s show the team at Elixir Outlaws play host! Chris Keathley, Amos King, and Anna Neyzberg give the Elixir Wizards a chance to talk about what they love about Elixir, how they learned it, and some of their experiences using it at SmartLogic!

We kick off the conversation with some memories of college and the different degrees everybody did, how these experiences fit into programming and the different paths that Justus, Eric, and Sundi took into the world of Elixir. From there, we dive into some of the amazing features about Elixir, highlighting pattern matching, readability, and how easy it is to think about how to write solutions to problems using it. Our conversation moves onto the topic of serving clients with Elixir, and here we consider the risk of basing a consultancy on one technology, as well as how open clients are to their needs being met with this young but powerful language. We also talk about training staff and convincing teams to adopt Elixir, covering themes of barriers to entry, the job market, and using the Elixir community as a resource. For a fun conversation about Elixir where our hosts take the mic as guests, be sure to tune in today.

Key Points From This Episode:

• Introducing this season’s topic and today’s plan where the hosts become guests.
• How Justus, Eric and Sundi got introduced to Elixir and their respective journeys using it.
• Everybody discusses their forays into programming and compares their different degrees.
• Hustles Justus did at college to get tuition cheaper for his friends and him.
• ‘Staking a consultancy on a tech’; how SmartLogic adopted Elixir initially.
• How the first few clients SmartLogic served with Elixir felt about the language being used.
• Sundi’s onboarding experience at CAVA and how she got introduced to Elixir.
• How Justus discovered the beauty of Elixir after he began to understand pattern matching.
• Sundi’s thoughts about hidden functionality in JavaScript code versus Elixir which reads better.
• Whether using Elixir to solve problems feels easy due to familiarity or its inherent characteristics.
• Conventions SmartLogic is implementing regarding using Elixir to build projects.
• The lack of introductory resources for learning Elixir and the team’s attempts at making some.
• The value of getting involved in your community for learning a new technology.
• Find out the value of investing in staff training for companies who want to switch to Elixir.
• A new wall between Dev and Ops in the form of Kubernetes.
• How to get your co-workers to learn Elixir if you are passionate about it.
• Growth at SmartLogic, new hires, and what they specialize in.
• The job landscape in 2020 and how this relates to having Elixir under your belt.

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

SmartLogic — https://smartlogic.io/
Chris Keathley on Twitter — https://twitter.com/chriskeathley
Amos King on Twitter — https://twitter.com/adkron
Anna Neyzberg on Twitter — https://twitter.com/aneyzb
Sundi Myint on Twitter — https://twitter.com/sundikhin
Justus Eapen — https://twitter.com/JustusEapen
Eric Oestrich on Twitter — https://twitter.com/ericoestrich
CAVA — https://cava.com/
Pavlok — https://pavlok.com/
Johnny Boursiquot — https://www.jboursiquot.com/
ElixirBridge — http://elixirbridge.org/
Matt Mills on GitHub — https://github.com/photomattmills
Brooklyn Zelenca on Functional Programming — https://smartlogic.io/podcast/elixir-wizards/s3e9-zelenka/
Bleacher Report — https://bleacherreport.com/
LiveView by Bruce Tate — https://pragprog.com/titles/passlive/programmer-passport-liveview/

Special Guests: Amos King, Anna Neyzberg, and Chris Keathley.