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)
Chris Keathley on Wallaby and Raft – Elixir Internals
In this episode of the podcast we are joined by Chris Keathley to continue our exploration of Elixir internals as he tells us about two very popular libraries that he developed, Wallaby and Raft. We start off with some background and his initial experiences with Elixir and open source projects before diving into Wallaby and some of the biggest lessons that Chris learned during and after his work on the library.
Chris does a great job of explaining concurrent tests and the Sandbox and some of the reasons he has pretty much stopped working on the front end of projects. From there we move onto another one of Chris' exciting projects, Raft! In order to introduce the library, Chris explains more about consensus algorithms, Leslie Lamport and his groundbreaking work on Paxos. Raft is, in some ways, a simplified, more accessible version of Paxos for Elixir and Chris goes on to give a brief rundown of its inner workings. For this great conversation with a great guest, join us today!
Key Points From This Episode:
- Chris' background, history with Elixir and his current employment.
- How Chris got started with open source work.
- Why Chris has moved away from front end work in the last while.
- The major lessons Chris learned while building Wallaby.
- How the concurrent tests work on Wallaby and the Sandbox.
- Why Chris is still excited about Raft, even though he hasn't touched it in a while.
- Explaining Raft, consensus algorithms and Paxos.
- How the Raft library actually works; building Raft systems and processes.
- Where to find and connect with Chris online!
- And much more!
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
SmartLogic — https://www.smartlogic.io/
Chris Keathley — https://keathley.io/
Chris Keathley on github — https://github.com/keathley
Bleacher Report — https://bleacherreport.com/
Wallaby — https://hexdocs.pm/wallaby/Wallaby.html
Raft — https://raft.github.io/
Erlang — https://www.erlang.org/
Slack — https://slack.com/
Leslie Lamport — http://www.lamport.org/
Paxos Made Live — https://blog.acolyer.org/2015/03/05/paxos-made-live/
Elixir Outlaws Podcast — https://elixiroutlaws.com/
Special Guest: Chris Keathley.