Elixir Wizards is an interview-format podcast, focused on engineers who use the Elixir programming language. Initially launched in early 2019, each season focuses on a specific topic or topics, with each interview focusing on the guest's experience and opinions on the topic. Elixir Wizards is hosted by Eric Oestrich and Sundi Myint of SmartLogic, a dev shop that’s been building custom software since 2005 and running Elixir applications in production since 2015. Learn more about how SmartLogic uses Phoenix and Elixir. (https://smartlogic.io/phoenix-and-elixir?utm_source=podcast)
Dave Lucia on Rustler – Elixir Internals
Our guest today on the show is Dave Lucia, who is currently the Vice President of Engineering at SimpleBet. He is here as part of Elixir Internals series, to talk to us and all our listeners about Rustler and the contribution he made to the library! According to our guest, Rustler acts as a bridge between Rust and Elixir and allows users to employ the power of Rust within Elixir and a great example of this can be found in Dave's work at SimpleBet. He explains some of this application and the functionality and improvement it offers and the big difference the machine learning models make to this work. Dave also gives us some background to his work and career, previous employment and early explorations of open-source software. He also shares some great tips for problem-solving and learning and improving at programming in Rust. We unpack some of the biggest challenges that faced the creation of Rustler, notable differences between Rust and Elixir and the technical components of the library that the team created. For all this and then some, join us for this great episode!
Key Points From This Episode:
- More about our guest and his current work at SimpleBet.
- How Dave got started with Elixir while at Bloomberg.
- The interesting and beautiful way in which The Outline used Elixir.
- Dave's early forays and experiences with open source software.
- Problem finding and solving; Dave's tips to those wanting to improve.
- Dave's employers' contribution and allowance for open source projects.
- Introducing Rustler and what users can do with it!
- The biggest challenges of using multiple languages in the backend.
- How Rustler works; the core, the code generator and more.
- The most important differences between Rust and Elixir.
- Dave's best advice and resources for learning and mastering Rust.
- And much more!
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
SmartLogic — https://www.smartlogic.io
Dave Lucia — https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-lucia-a395441b
Rustler — https://github.com/rusterlium/rustler
SimpleBet — https://simplebet.io
Dave Lucia on Twitter — https://twitter.com/davydog187
Dave Lucia Email — dave@simplebet.io
Elixir — https://elixir-lang.org
Python — https://www.python.org
JavaScript — https://www.javascript.com
Rust — https://www.rust-lang.org
Bloomberg — https://www.bloomberg.com
Slack — https://slack.com
Vox Media — https://www.voxmedia.com
The Outline — https://theoutline.com
The Rust Programming Language — https://www.amazon.com/Rust-Programming-Language-Steve-Klabnik/dp/1593278284
Rust Playground — https://play.rust-lang.org
Elm Compiler — https://github.com/elm/compiler
Special Guest: Dave Lucia.