In Episode 7 of Elixir Wizards Office Hours, SmartLogic Engineers Joel Meador and Charles Suggs join host Owen Bickford to tackle the often tricky task of adding print functionality to web applications. They discuss their recent experiences with browser-based printing and the hurdles of cross-browser compatibility, consistent styling, and dynamic content generation, such as headers and footers. The trio delves into the limitations of current printing capabilities in browsers, the potential of server-side PDF generation, and the necessity of juggling separate templates for web and print. They a ..read more

In Office Hours Episode 6, SmartLogic Developers Anna Dorigo and Bilal Hankins join Elixir Wizards Sundi and Dan to discuss their experiences maintaining a decade-old Ruby on Rails codebase. They delve into the critical importance of deeply understanding the codebase, keeping dependencies current, and adapting to the original application's evolving priorities and design choices. The conversation spans a range of topics, including accessibility, testing, monitoring, and the challenges of deploying database migrations in production environments. The guests share effective strategies for sustaini ..read more

In today's episode, Elixir Wizards Owen and Dan delve into the complexities of building advanced reporting features within software applications. They share personal insights and challenges encountered while developing reporting solutions for user-generated data, leveraging both Elixir/Phoenix and Ruby on Rails. The discussion zeroes in on crucial data modeling and architectural decisions that enhance reporting efficiency and flexibility. Owen and Dan explore tactics like materialized views, event sourcing, and database triggers to optimize data handling while being mindful of UX elements like ..read more

In Elixir Wizards Office Hours Episode 4, SmartLogic Product Designer Ava Slivkoff joins hosts Sundi Myint and Owen Bickford to discuss the product designer's role in software development. Ava shares her experience navigating client expectations, software design principles, and technical constraints. They explore the integration of design and development workflows and how designers and engineers can collaborate to meet a project's specific needs. The conversation emphasizes the value of cross-functional teams and the synergy that can arise when all team members work in harmony to bring a produ ..read more

In Elixir Wizards Office Hours Episode 2, "Discovery Discoveries," SmartLogic's Project Manager Alicia Brindisi and VP of Delivery Bri LaVorgna join Elixir Wizards Sundi Myint and Owen Bickford on an exploratory journey through the discovery phase of the software development lifecycle. This episode highlights how collaboration and communication transform the client-project team dynamic into a customized expedition. The goal of discovery is to reveal clear business goals, understand the end user, pinpoint key project objectives, and meticulously document the path forward in a Product Requiremen ..read more

The Elixir Wizards Podcast is back with Season 12 Office Hours, where we talk with the internal SmartLogic team about the stages of the software development lifecycle. For the season premiere, "Testing 1, 2, 3," Joel Meador and Charles Suggs join us to discuss the nuances of software testing. In this episode, we discuss everything from testing philosophies to test driven development (TDD), integration, and end-user testing. Our guests share real-world experiences that highlight the benefits of thorough testing, challenges like test maintenance, and problem-solving for complex production enviro ..read more

For the final episode of Elixir Wizards’ Season 11 “Branching Out from Elixir,” we’re featuring a recent discussion from the Software Unscripted podcast. In this conversation, José Valim, creator of Elixir, interviews Richard Feldman, creator of Roc. They compare notes on the process and considerations for creating a language. This episode covers the origins of creating a language, its influences, and how goals shape the tradeoffs in programming language design. José and Richard share anecdotes from their experiences guiding the evolution of Elixir and Roc. The discussion provides an insightfu ..read more

Today on Elixir Wizards, Wojtek Mach of HexPM and Amal Hussein, engineering leader and former NPM team member, join Owen Bickford to compare notes on package management in Elixir vs. JavaScript. This lively conversation covers everything from best practices for dependency management to API design, SemVer (semantic versioning), and the dark ages of web development before package managers existed. The guests debate philosophical differences between the JavaScript and Elixir communities. They highlight the JavaScript ecosystem's maturity and identify potential areas of improvement, contrasted aga ..read more

Today on Elixir Wizards, Camille Clayton, Director of Women Who Code DC, and Scott Tolinski, Co-Host of the Syntax Podcast and Creator of Level Up Tutorials, join hosts Sundi Myint and Owen Bickford to discuss tech community spaces online and IRL. They lay out the blueprint and best practices for fostering an inclusive environment where newcomers feel comfortable and welcome to join the discussion – whether it’s an online forum, YouTube comment sections, social media platform, local meetup, or conference. Topics discussed in this episode: Leaving a space open so newcomers feel empowered to jo ..read more

In this episode of Elixir Wizards, Xiang Ji and Nathan Hessler join hosts Sundi Myint and Owen Bickford to compare actor model implementation in Elixir, Ruby, and Clojure. In Elixir, the actor model is core to how the BEAM VM works, with lightweight processes communicating asynchronously via message passing. GenServers provide a common abstraction for building actors, handling messages, and maintaining internal state. In Ruby, the actor model is represented through Ractors, which currently map to OS threads. They discuss what we can learn by comparing models, understanding tradeoffs between VM ..read more