Episode 104: Hot Pockets and Refresh Buttons

Elixir Outlaws

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On today’s episode of the Elixir Outlaws, Sean Cribbs and Amos King are going to talk about
the Elixir Conference. Amos talks about his ordeal to reach the Elixir Conference, his flight
continuously got canceled, and the entire journey was hectic for him. From the scariest
landing to nonstop flights getting canceled, rescheduled, and re-routed, Sean’s travel ordeal
covers all.

Episode Highlights:
 Amos gives detailed insights about his talk and pre-preparation. He has a habit of
continuously improving his speech and slides, and this is precisely what he did when
he got the extra time due to flight cancellations and re-routing.
 Amos received a lot of positive feedback, and he had a wonderful experience at the
conference. For him, it was nice to be around people again post-pandemic.
 Amos suggests before giving a speech, and you don’t have to write out the entire
talk, write notes for things that you need to say in a specific way.
 Sean talks about a funny incident that happened in QCON 2014, and he explains
why he has a meme and a Russian Fake Facebook account.
 While giving a talk at the vendor track at QCON, which is a big industry very
expensive enterprise technology conference type thing, Sean made a funny posture
with his hands.
 At the QCON, the photographers have a talent for catching speakers with their hands
and really interesting and kind of disturbing positions. Sean tried hard not to make
any postures, but the photographer still got a funny picture that later got circulated as
a meme.
 Amos explains how nerves are set up; you can use nerves to deploy to your servers
if you want to. Because you just have to have something that can run Linux. So now
you have B partitions that automatically swap over if one fails. So you can use the
nerves hub to deploy to your servers. You just have to build a nerves image for
whatever server you have.
 Sean and Amos explain how you can accomplish really great things when your tools
are well built.
 Amos says there have been a lot of things that the nerves team and working on
nerves has brought back to the ecosystem as a whole.
 Sean feels that there is a lot of good stuff going right now, but there is also a long
way to go before you can really feel like, hey, this out of the box or very close to out
of the box new Elixir project, it is going to have metrics tracing, logging, built in. So,
Sean feels that he just has to add his own flavor for this particular project and make
that part of his engineering process.
 Sean talks about a crypto finance company and one of its major functions, i.e.,
trading.
 Sean explains how there are multiple systems within an infrastructure that interacts
as part of the process.
 As soon as you know your product is viable, you get feedback to give users better
experiences, says Amos.
 Sean explains how one can directly correlate to the cost of the server, and one can
save memory.
 Talking about his side projects, Sean said his project capacity planner became one
of his major projects.
 Sometimes you just have to turn people away in order to serve anyone, says Sean.

 There are a bunch of products without the sort of visibility to their customers even
those products do not have value or not apparent value like the content distribution
networks (CDN).
 While talking about passing the acceptance test, Sean says to Amos that you can
build these kinds of things that look like single-page apps, but they are completely
server-side driven, and you can manage this state and Elixir, and that is great.

3 Key Points

1. Amos says that at the conference, they mainly talked about whenever you are doing acceptance tests driver browser or really any system that you have to wait for things like transitions so that as a user, you might not think about.
2. Amos talks about his coding journey and how he learned the basics of programming.
3. Sean explains how virtuous feedback cycles make your business successful in addition to your technical side.

Tweetable Quotes
 “You should not take more food than you can eat, but you also don’t have to eat
everything like don’t make yourself miserable. It’s not good for your health.” – Amos
 “Computer is often faster than what the dropdown will actually open in the browser
so.” – Sean Cribbs
 “The very first code that I traded run was also the most complicated.” – Amos
 “If you learn with small talk, you’re probably in the right place.” – Amos
 “Categorically deploying Elixir does not exist.”- Amos
 “If people know how to measure their systems, then they can get in a situation where
they fire up 96 of the largest instances on their cloud provider and don’t care about
the cost.” – Sean

Resources Mentioned:
 Podcast Editing

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