José Valim, Guillaume Duboc, and Giuseppe Castagna on the Future of Types in Elixir
June 8, 2023

An Elixir podcast from SmartLogic; conversations with software developers from around the world on the Elixir language and other modern web technologies.
RSS | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Overcast | Pocket Casts | Spotify | Stitcher
Join us on Discord
Listen to our latest episode:
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 hosts as of Season Ten are Sundi Myint, Owen Bickford, and Bilal Hankins.
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: Our transcript writers 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 | Season Seven: The Impact of Elixir | Season Eight: Elixir in a Polyglot Environment | Season Nine: Parsing the Particulars | Season Ten: The Next Ten Years of Elixir
In Season 10 of the Elixir Wizards podcast, we delve into "The Next Ten Years of Elixir," exploring the future of DevOps, cyber security, cloud infrastructure, and machine learning. This season is a comprehensive exploration of the opportunities and challenges Elixir faces in the coming decade.
Conversations with industry experts, including Elixir creator José Valim, highlight the community's commitment to education, the evolution of Phoenix and BEAM, and the advent of types in Elixir. We also discuss the role of tools like liveBook and HTTP/3 in the ecosystem's growth.
Season Ten began airing in March 2023.
José Valim on the Future of the Elixir Ecosystem
May 11, 2023
Mat Trudel on the Future of Phoenix and Web Transports
April 27, 2023
Mike Waud and Tony Winn on the Future of Elixir on the Grid
April 20, 2023
Sophie DeBenedetto on the Future of Elixir and LiveView
April 13, 2023
Michael Lubas on the Future of Elixir Security
April 6, 2023
Cory O'Daniel and the Future of DevOps in Elixir Programming
March 30, 2023
Season 10 Kickoff: The Hosts Discuss The Future of Elixir
March 23, 2023
The theme for Elixir Wizards Season 9 is "Parsing the Particulars." Hosts Sundi, Owen, Dan, and Bilal take a deep dive into the intricacies of Elixir development. The Wizards explore critical aspects of the Elixir programming language, including: observability, GenServers, geomapping, Phoenix LiveView, Oban, Tailwind, and Nerves.
Inherently, language is about communicating ideas and communicating ideas is like abstraction essentially, right? When you think about what a programming language is, it's a general abstraction over computation- Chris Miller in S09E12 Crafting a Programming Language
Season Nine began airing in September 2022.
That's a Wrap: Season 9 Finale with Sundi, Bilal, Owen & Dan!
December 29, 2022
Marcelo Dominguez on Command and Query Responsibility Segregation
December 22, 2022
Chris Miller on Crafting a Programming Language
December 15, 2022
Frank Hunleth and Joe Martin on the Particulars of Nerves
December 8, 2022
Jenny Bramble on Testing and Collaboration at Papa
December 1, 2022
Harper Atlas on Tailwind From the Perspective of a Designer
November 17, 2022
Theo Harris on Onboarding into Elixir at Alembic
November 10, 2022
Ashley Smith & Kenneth Moy from Bowery Farming on Oban
November 3, 2022
Jason Stiebs on LiveView at RokkinCat
October 27, 2022
Mark & David from Thinking Elixir on Ecto Queries
October 20, 2022
Tyler Young on Geo Mapping at Felt
October 13, 2022
Kate Rezentes on GenServers at Simplebet
October 6, 2022
Dave Lucia on Observability at Bitfo
September 29, 2022
We're baaaack! Season 9 Teaser
September 22, 2022
Season Eight aired from April 2022 through June 2022.
Our theme in Season Eight is Elixir in a Polyglot Environment. We'll be talking with our guests about how Elixir is used in context with other languages, how they play nicely (or not) together, and how teams manage context switching, constrain complexity, and generally think about how Elixir works within their overal product infrastructure.
Looking back on Season 8 with Sundi, Owen & Dan
June 29, 2022
Nathan Retta on Engineering in Android at DoorDash
June 23, 2022
Cara Mitchell on Internal In-house eCommerce
June 16, 2022
Catalina Astengo on The Many Languages of Nav
June 9, 2022
Jessica Kerr on Systems Thinking for Developers
May 26, 2022
Nathan Willson on the Polyglot Landscape in Japan
May 12, 2022
Devon Estes on The Power of Functional Programming
April 21, 2022
Miguel Cobá on Deploying in Elixir and Other Languages
April 14, 2022
Our theme in Season Seven was The Impact of Elixir — examining the history of Elixir programming, and the change that it has had on programming in different areas of the software development industry. We spoke with our guests about the impact of Elixir on their careers and in their organizations, as well as broader cultural and technological contexts.
Season Seven aired from November 2021 through February 2022.
The part that was fascinating to me when I got into Cars.com was to realize what the business actually is: it’s a huge ETL pipeline of different data points.— Angel Jose in S7E2 on Re-Platforming One of the Original Dot Coms
Todd Resudek on the Impact of Elixir
February 3, 2022
Meryl Dakin on Changing Lanes and Switching Gears With Elixir
January 20, 2022
Brooklyn Zelenka and The Exciting World of Edge Computing
January 13, 2022
Sigu Magwa on the Elixir Community in Kenya
January 6, 2022
Casting Spells with Brooklin Myers
December 16, 2021
Speedcubing and Building Livebook with Jonatan Kłosko
December 9, 2021
Protocols in Elixir with Yiming Chen
December 2, 2021
Learning and Teaching Functional Programming with Adolfo Neto
November 23, 2021
The Benefits of Consistently Growing Your Toolset with Florian Kraft
November 18, 2021
Re-Platforming One of the Original Dot Coms in Elixir with Angel Jose
November 11, 2021
The Impact of Elixir Launchisode
November 4, 2021
The theme of Season Six was 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.
What is hidden by programming languages? How do developers find varying levels of hidden functionality to be alternately useful or problematic — or maybe both! Season Six aired from May - Aug 2021.
We wanted to build fault tolerant systems, and things are going to go wrong. They always do. You need to just accept the fact things are going to go wrong. How can you build systems that can handle errors?— Robert Virding in S6E1 on The Roots of Erlang
Wrapping up BEAM Magic with Amos King
August 26, 2021
Delving Deeper into Magic with Quinn Wilton
August 12, 2021
The Bridge Between Elixir and Zig with Isaac Yonemoto
August 5, 2021
Testing Elixir with Jeffrey Matthias and Andrea Leopardi
July 15, 2021
Scaling and The Growth Curve with Francesco Cesarini
June 3, 2021
The Right Amount of Magic with Erik Person
May 13, 2021
Robert Virding on the Roots of Erlang
May 6, 2021
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
Jenn Gamble on Data Science, Machine Learning, and Elixir
March 18, 2021
John Mertens on Adopting Elixir at Change.org
March 11, 2021
Sophie DeBenedetto on Programming Phoenix LiveView
March 4, 2021
Brian Howenstein on How ClusterTruck is Innovating Food Delivery
February 18, 2021
Alexandra Chakeres on Moving Towards an Inclusive Elixir Community
February 4, 2021
Jason Axelson on the Elixir Language Server
January 14, 2021
Steve Domin on Innovating Travel APIs
January 8, 2021
Shawn Vo on Elixir as a Competitive Advantage
December 29, 2020
Viktória Fördős on Erlang
December 22, 2020
Simon Glenn-Gregg on Building an Election Results Prototype in Elixir
December 17, 2020
Randall Thomas on Learning Elixir and Why Community Matters
December 10, 2020
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
Anna Sherman on Change, Failure, and living in Gig City
October 8, 2020
Devon Estes on how Architecture Is a Myth and One-file Design
October 1, 2020
Lizzie Paquette on Compiling, Microliths, and Macros
September 24, 2020
Eric Steen on Neuroevolution in AI
September 17, 2020
Miki Rezentes on how it's APIs All the Way Down
September 1, 2020
ElixirConf 2020 Preview
August 27, 2020
Mark Windholtz on Domain-Driven Design (DDD)
August 20, 2020
Lau Taarnskov on the Trouble with Time Zones
July 23, 2020
Chris McCord with a Deep Dive on Phoenix
July 9, 2020
Dave Thomas on Learning How Things Work
June 18, 2020
Ben Marx on the Launch and Architecture of SubSpace
June 11, 2020
Pattern Matching - Johanna Larsson
June 9, 2020
Steve Bussey on Real-Time Applications
May 28, 2020
Season Four Launchisode
May 14, 2020
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 Three Wrap and Remote Work Tips
April 2, 2020
Saša Jurić on Training
March 19, 2020
Bonus Episode: Outlaws and Wizards
March 13, 2020
Devon Estes from Sketch on Benchee, Performance and Training
March 12, 2020
Second Annual Lonestar Lunchisode
March 5, 2020
Bonus Toddcast & Lonestar Preview
February 27, 2020
Alex Garibay and Mike Binns from DockYard on Hiring and Training
February 20, 2020
Sean Lewis from Divvy on Performance, Hiring and Training
February 13, 2020
Paul Schoenfelder and Hans Elias Josephsen on Lumen and Performance
February 6, 2020
Brooklyn Zelenka on Functional Programming
January 23, 2020
Bruce and Maggie Tate from Groxio on Training
January 16, 2020
Dan Ivovich from SmartLogic on Hiring and Training
January 9, 2020
Eric Meadows Jönsson on Hex and Working with Elixir
January 2, 2020
Chris Keathley on Performance and Functional Programming
December 19, 2019
Brad Traylor of Podium on Training & Hiring – Working with Elixir
December 5, 2019
José Valim, Creator of Elixir
November 26, 2019
Season 3 Trailer
November 19, 2019
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 Two Wrap
October 3, 2019
Dave Lucia on Rustler – Elixir Internals
September 26, 2019
Eric Oestrich on ExVenture – Elixir Internals
September 19, 2019
Sophie DeBenedetto on Excrypt and Railway – Elixir Internals
September 12, 2019
Shanti Chellaram on Pri-Queue and raft_erl – Elixir Internals
September 5, 2019
Michał Muskała on Ecto and jason – Elixir Internals
August 29, 2019
Todd Resudek on Hex – Elixir Internals
August 22, 2019
Chris Keathley on Wallaby and Raft – Elixir Internals
August 15, 2019
René Föhring on Credo – Elixir Internals
August 8, 2019
Meryl Dakin on Token Alchemist – Elixir Internals
August 1, 2019
Paul Schoenfelder on Distillery – Elixir Internals
July 25, 2019
Bryan Joseph on ElixirScript – Elixir Internals
July 18, 2019
Brooklyn Zelenka on Witchcraft - Elixir Internals
July 11, 2019
Season 2 Trailer
July 9, 2019
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.
Elixir in Production Recap
April 18, 2019
Jeffrey Matthias from Community - Elixir in Production
April 11, 2019
Jay Ashe from Cava - Elixir in Production
April 4, 2019
Frank Hunleth - Elixir in Production
March 28, 2019
Mark Ericksen - Elixir in Production
March 21, 2019
Brooklyn Zelenka from SPADE Co. - Elixir in Production
March 14, 2019
Todd Resudek from Weedmaps - Elixir in Production
March 7, 2019
Lonestar ElixirConf 2019 Lunchisode
March 6, 2019
Dan Ivovich from SmartLogic - Elixir in Production
February 28, 2019
Ryan Billingsley from ClusterTruck - Elixir in Production
February 28, 2019
Smart Software Season 1 Trailer
February 25, 2019