Elixir Wizards Podcast

An Elixir podcast from SmartLogic; conversations with software developers from around the world on the Elixir language and other modern web technologies.


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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. Our regular hosts include Eric Oestrich and Sundi Myint; Alex Housand is our mini-features host beginning in Season Six.

Have a great season topic idea, guest suggestion, or other feedback? Email it to us at [email protected] or tweet at us @smartlogic, we love hearing from our listeners.

Note: We've resumed per-episode transcripts starting with Season Four, but our transcribers aren't technical experts — if you see any errors in the show transcripts, you can submit a pull request and we'll happily make the updates!

Jump to a season: Season One: Elixir in Production | Season Two: Elixir Internals | Season Three: Working with Elixir | Season Four: Application and System Architecture | Season Five: Adopting Elixir

Season Six: BEAM Magic

Our theme this season is BEAM Magic — taking a look at what gets handled under the hood with Elixir, other languages that run on the BEAM, and talking about how much magic is the right amount — there are a lot of strongly held opinions on this, that are reflected in how much “magic” is included in different programming languages.

Basically, this season we want to dig in to what is hidden by programming languages, and talk about how people find varying levels of hidden functionality to be alternately useful or problematic (and maybe both!)

New episodes will begin airing in May 2021.

Season Five: Adopting Elixir

Our theme for season five was Adopting Elixir. We spoke with technology leaders at product companies, consultancies, and on internal technical teams about their companies' journeys to adopting Elixir (or not adopting Elixir). Season Five aired from December 2020-March 2021.

You don't have to convince your company to make a wholesale switch to Elixir if you can just deploy something — something that adds value and you can get people using that. You can make an incremental change.
— Shaun Robinson in S5E13 on Using Elixir to Empower Online Learning

Season Four: Application and System Architecture

In season four our theme was Application and System Architecture; we talked with guests about how they think about design vs architecture, domain driven design, umbrella apps, and more.

The really important thing that architecture should do is carve out a safe space so you can build your essential complexity. And that safe space is where I want to work in.
— Mark Windholtz in S4E14 on Domain-Driven Design

Season Three: Working with Elixir

In season three our theme was Working with Elixir, encompassing Functional Programming, Hiring/Training, and Performance. The season ran from November 2019 to April 2020.

Challenging them, pushing them and still giving them enough information to figure something out and to get that win and to fix that bug or solve that problem or get to that next level of understanding – I think that’s how you can really teach someone to fall in love with coding.
— Sophie DeBenedetto in S3E10 on Training and Building Elixir Projects Under Constraints

Season Two: Elixir Internals

In our second season, released from July-September of 2019, we focused on Elixir Internals; we talked with developers behind some of the most popular Elixir libraries, including Witchcraft, ElixirScript, Distillery, Ecto, and more!

Contributing back to libraries both forces you to read how other people are writing code and collaborate with other people.
— Brooklyn Zelenka in S2E1 Elixir Internals on Witchcraft

Season One: Elixir in Production

Our first season, released from February-April of 2019, focused on Elixir in production and featured conversations with engineers who have live production apps built with Elixir. We talked about why Elixir, implementation details, libraries, patterns, and tips for real-world applications. Take a listen to the trailer embedded below or click in to any of the episodes in the list to listen to season one.