As our first trilogy comes to a close, and we embark on the next one, we’re doing what all great trilogies do: Upending everything that made the initial one great and starting afresh. We have taken on board some excellent listener feedback to keep this the highest quality Elixir related podcast. So, for this launchisode, rather than doing a trailer, we are diving in headfirst with a full episode on system and application architecture, this season’s theme, with Justus Eapen, Dan Ivovich, and Eric Oestrich.

We kick off the show by getting to know Dan and Eric a bit better. This season, as per listener requests, we will spend more time on our guests' personal lives. We learn about Dan and Eric’s time at SmartLogic, their experience working with Elixir, and their approaches to learning it. From there, we move onto tackling clients’ projects. We discuss the importance of letting ideas flow free as well as how to break projects down into manageable sized segments to work on. Following this, we touch on flexible architecture. As the world changes, sometimes at a pace faster than we anticipate, it is more important than ever to design systems that we can iterate on. Then, we discuss the future of applications and architecture and the exciting possibilities in-store.

The show rounds off with our new segment, Pattern Matching with Todd, where our friend Todd Resudek gets to know someone in the community a bit better. Today, he talks with Connor Rigby of Binary Noggin, finding out more about his programing journey, his favorite music and movies, and his WiFi meshing project. We're so excited for this season, and we hope you join us on the journey. Tune in today!

Key Points From This Episode:

• Dan’s background and how he came to be Director of Development Operations.
• How Eric started at SmartLogic and what his journey at the company has been like.
• Learn what convinced Dan to go all-in on Elixir and make the move from Rails
• Some of the educational materials and tools Dan and Eric used to learn Elixir.
• Dan’s preferred style of design and why he enjoys TDD.
• Why we think that Cucumber falls short and chose to move away from it.
• Find out what we think domain-driven design is.
• How Dan and Eric approach deconstructing clients’ projects.
• Pre-coding: Why it’s best to do free-form planning, with no constraints.
• Insights into the broad-reaching term of ‘API’ and what we mean by it.
• SOAP and REST APIs: What they are and the differences between them.
• How Dan, Eric, and Justus’s thinking about designing and application architecture has evolved.
• Object-oriented programming versus functional: Our take on the age-old debate.
• Is this finally the year that we get to kill micro-services?
• The relationship between team size and micro-services and some other constraints.
• What the future has in store for applications and architecting.
• Pattern-matching with Todd: Five questions to get to know Connor Rigby a bit better.

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

Justus Eapen on Twitter — https://twitter.com/justuseapen
Dan Ivovich on Twitter — https://twitter.com/danivovich
Eric Oestrich on Twitter — https://twitter.com/ericoestrich
Kalevala on GitHub — https://github.com/oestrich/kalevala
Valve — https://www.valvesoftware.com/en/
Ecto — https://hexdocs.pm/ecto/Ecto.html
Phoenix Elixir books — https://pragprog.com/book/phoenix14/programming-phoenix-1-4
Ruby on Rails — https://rubyonrails.org/
Designing for Scalability with Erlang — http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920024149.do
Mike Amundsen on O’Reily Media — https://www.oreilly.com/pub/au/1192
Designing Elixir Systems With OTP — https://www.amazon.com/Designing-Elixir-Systems-OTP-Self-healing/dp/1680506617
Cucumber — https://cucumber.io/
Visual Studio Code — https://code.visualstudio.com/
SOAP vs REST APIs — https://www.soapui.org/learn/api/soap-vs-rest-api/
RESTFest — https://www.restfest.org/
ExVenture — https://exventure.org/
Kubernetes — https://kubernetes.io/
Phoenix — https://phoenixframework.org/
Nerves Project — https://www.nerves-project.org/
Todd Resudek on Twitter — https://twitter.com/sprsmpl
Binary Noggin — https://binarynoggin.com/
Connor Rigby on GitHub — https://github.com/ConnorRigby
The Big Lebowski — https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118715/
Aesop Rock on Twitter — https://twitter.com/AesopRockWins
All That Remains on Twitter — https://twitter.com/ATRhq
Korn — https://www.kornofficial.com/
Eric Meadows-Jönsson on Twitter — https://twitter.com/emjii
Donnie Darko — https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0246578/
Richard Kelly — https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0446819/
Frank Hunleth on Twitter — https://twitter.com/fhunleth
SmartLogic — https://smartlogic.io/

Special Guests: Connor Rigby and Dan Ivovich.