194: Operational Elixir: Knowing When to Grow Up

In the final installment of our series, we sit down with the creator of the Ash framework, Zach Daniel, to move beyond his expertise in Ash and explore his experiences with the other systems we use to support our Elixir applications. Zach shares his journey from the dynamic environment of startups to the structured world of midsize companies, giving us a glimpse into the strategic timing for scaling monitoring and data collection tools. He emphasizes the value of fostering a blame-free culture and sheds light on his hands-on encounters with deployments, Kubernetes, and more!

Show Notes online - http://podcast.thinkingelixir.com/194

Elixir Community News

• https://github.com/erlang/otp/pull/8111 – The json module was merged into Erlang OTP, adding it to the standard library and is expected to be included in OTP 27 RC 2.
• https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/blob/v1.16/CHANGELOG.md#v1162-2024-03-10 – Release notes for Elixir v1.16.2, detailing bug fixes and minor additions.
• https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2024/03/05/veeps-elixir-case/ – A new case study on scaling a streaming service for hundreds of thousands of concurrent viewers using Elixir at Veeps.
• https://github.com/elixir-unicode/unicode_string – Kip Cole's Unicode String library release 1.4.0 includes dictionary-based word breaking for several Asian languages.
• https://github.com/jonatanklosko/mix_install_watcher/ – Jonatan Kłosko's project, mix_install_watcher, assists with automatic recompilation of path dependencies in Livebook notebooks.
• https://twitter.com/germsvel/status/1767499526309347739 – German Velasco shares a video example of an anti-pattern in Elixir documentation related to complex extraction in clauses.
• https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/code-anti-patterns.html#complex-extractions-in-clauses – Detailed documentation regarding code anti-patterns in Elixir, specifically "complex extractions in clauses."
• https://github.com/abdelaz3r/sparkline_svg – SparklineSVG v0.4 released, providing a simple, zero-dependency Elixir library for generating SVG sparkline charts.
• https://hexdocs.pm/sparkline_svg/changelog.html – Changelog for SparklineSVG library showcasing recent updates and features.

Do you have some Elixir news to share? Tell us at @ThinkingElixir or email at [email protected]

Discussion Resources

• https://ash-hq.org/
• https://alembic.com.au/
• https://podcast.thinkingelixir.com/27 – Previous interview with Zach about Ash
• https://podcast.thinkingelixir.com/123 – Previous interview with Zach about Ash
• https://github.com/spandex-project/spandex
• https://opentelemetry.io/
• https://www.appsignal.com/
• https://www.datadoghq.com/
• https://zipkin.io/
• https://posthog.com/
• https://segment.com/
• https://github.com/cabol/nebulex
• https://mode.com/
• https://www.tableau.com/
• https://postmarkapp.com/
• Async is the NOT answer you think it is.
• Declarative programming is so important and beneficial. It's worth learning more about it.

Guest Information

• https://twitter.com/ZachSDaniel1 – Zach on Twitter
• https://twitter.com/AshFramework – Ash Framework on Twitter
• https://github.com/zachdaniel/ – on Github
• https://genserver.social/zachdaniel – on Fediverse
• https://zachdaniel.dev/about – Blog
• https://ash-hq.org – Ash Framework site

Find us online

• Message the show - @ThinkingElixir
• Message the show on Fediverse - @[email protected]
• Email the show - [email protected]
• Mark Ericksen - @brainlid
• Mark Ericksen on Fediverse - @[email protected]
• David Bernheisel - @bernheisel
• David Bernheisel on Fediverse - @[email protected]
• Cade Ward - @cadebward
• Cade Ward on Fediverse - @[email protected]