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)
Sophie DeBenedetto on Excrypt and Railway – Elixir Internals
Welcome to another episode of the podcast everybody! As we continue our journey into Elixir internals in Season 2, we welcome Sophie DeBenedetto to tell us about the two libraries she and the Flatiron School created! We talk about Encrypt and Railway and a bunch of other great stuff from the world of Elixir and open source and Sophie shares so much about why she is particularly excited about things at the moment. She talks about the maturation of the Elixir community and her first and most important open-source experiences before diving into her hopes for the future of these platforms. We also discuss the ins and out of the two libraries and our guest does a fantastic job of explaining their functions and the reasons they were built. Sophie shares the major challenges that faced her and the team in creating them and a whole lot more, so make sure to tune in today for all this great information!
Key Points From This Episode:
- A brief introduction to Sophie's career, the Flatiron School and her Elixir work.
- Sophie's first experiences with open source, contributing to the Elixir School.
- Flatiron's support of open source and their attitude towards the growth of engineers.
- Why Elixir and Ruby are such important languages to Sophie and Flatiron.
- Sophie's wishes for Elixir and what she wants to see more of in the community.
- Introducing Encrypt and Excrypt for Elixir and why Flatiron chose to build them.
- The hardest parts of building the library, the challenges of encryption.
- Elixir's built-in option parser; convenience and accessing data easily.
- The Railway hex package and what it enables users to do.
- Breaking down the functions of RabbitMQ for Erlang.
- The two things that Sophie is most excited about in the Elixir space right now!
- And much more!
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
Sophie DeBenedetto — http://sophiedebenedetto.nyc/
Flatiron School — http://sophiedebenedetto.nyc/
Elixir School — https://elixirschool.com/en/
Encrypt — https://github.com/flatiron-labs/encrypt
Escript — https://hexdocs.pm/mix/master/Mix.Tasks.Escript.Build.html
Ruby — https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/
Kafka — https://kafka.apache.org
Ecto — https://hexdocs.pm/ecto/Ecto.html
Erlang — https://www.erlang.org
RabbitMQ — https://www.rabbitmq.com
Phoenix — https://phoenixframework.org
LiveView — https://dockyard.com/blog/2018/12/12/phoenix-liveview-interactive-real-time-apps-no-need-to-write-javascript
Elixir Conf — https://elixirconf.com/2019
Special Guest: Sophie DeBenedetto.