AJ (Alykhan Jetha), CEO and CTO of Marketcircle, joins the Elixir Wizards to share his experience building and evolving Daylite, their award-winning CRM and business productivity app for Apple users. He details his experiences as a self-taught programmer and how Marketcircle has navigated pivots, challenges, and opportunities since its founding in 1999.

AJ explains why they migrated Daylite’s backend to Elixir, focusing on their sync engine, which demands high concurrency and fault tolerance. He highlights how Elixir has improved performance, reduced cloud costs, and simplified development with its approachable syntax and productive workflows.

The conversation also touches on the technical hurdles of deploying native apps for Apple devices and the potential for integrating new technologies like LiveView Native to streamline cross-platform development.

For technical founders, AJ emphasizes the importance of leveraging your strengths (“superpowers”), staying deeply connected to the development process, and finding stability in tools like Elixir amidst a rapidly evolving tech ecosystem. He also shares Marketcircle’s roadmap for migrating more customers to Elixir-powered systems and explores the potential for new features in their native apps.

Tune in for insights on building resilient systems, navigating technical and business challenges, and how Elixir is shaping Marketcircle’s future.

Topics discussed in this episode:

• AJ’s journey as a self-taught programmer and entrepreneur
• Marketcircle’s evolution since 1999 and lessons from their pivots
• Daylite’s growth as a flagship product for Apple users
• Migrating to Elixir for high concurrency and fault tolerance
• How Elixir improved performance and reduced cloud costs
• The simplicity of Elixir and its impact on developer onboarding
• Challenges in managing a growing microservices architecture
• Insights into deploying native apps for the Apple ecosystem
• Exploring LiveView Native for future cross-platform development
• Advice for technical founders: leveraging your superpowers
• Staying connected to development to maintain system understanding
• The role of Elixir in improving development efficiency and stability
• Planning gradual customer migrations to an Elixir-powered backend
• Potential new features for Daylite’s native apps
• Benefits of collaboration with the Elixir community
• #ElixirMullet -- native app in the front, Elixir in the back
• Navigating a rapidly evolving tech ecosystem as a founder
• Leveraging Elixir to future-proof Marketcircle’s systems
• Balancing technical and business priorities in a startup environment
• AJ’s thoughts on the future of Elixir in powering business tools

Links mentioned:

https://www.marketcircle.com/
Daylite.app
https://www.nextcomputers.org/
https://www.digitalocean.com/
Python Async https://docs.python.org/3/library/asyncio.html
https://github.com/sinatra/sinatra
https://github.com/dependabot
https://kafka.apache.org/
https://www.djangoproject.com/
https://github.com/socketry/falcon
https://github.com/puma/puma
https://www.swift.org/blog/announcing-swift-6/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Async/await
https://www.ffmpeg.org/
https://www.sqlite.org/
https://github.com/commanded/commanded
https://pragprog.com/titles/khpes/real-world-event-sourcing/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
https://reactnative.dev/
https://www.electronjs.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebOS
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alykhanjetha/
https://bsky.app/profile/ajetha.bsky.social

Special Guest: Alykhan Jetha.