Little's Law

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Elixir Outlaws, 02/22/2022

On today’s episode of the Elixir Outlaws, Amos and Sean are going to talk about authentication and authorization in applications as well as creating starter applications. The forms work great for air handling and everything inside of Phoenix if you are using a changeset otherwise, you got a lot of hand jamming for yourself, says Amos.

Episode Highlights
JavaScript has buttons to add fields or remove fields, things like that, but it is up to you if you decide that you are going to do it with live view.
Changesets don’t work super well with a list. If Amos tries to put in one thing in the list, which is already in the list, it is overriding the whole list.
For the invoice cases, whenever we want to add an item to the list, all those changes that are currently there will cause ripping of the form because we are affecting the changeset, says Amos.
If you change one of the items in a list, you have to pull everything out, make the one change, and put everything in this change; otherwise, you are going to overwrite the whole list. So, you are going to use the get field instead of getting change, suggests Amos.
Sean asks Amos, in your live view implementation, are you taking the changeset you have and trying to find a nested chainset inside it to modify it?
Once I have a list, there is this extra cognitive overhead to remember that I need to grab the original fields and make sure that those end up in the changes too, because, otherwise, I am going to overwrite the whole thing, says Amos.
Sean inquire from Amos, as you said, your invoice items need to be reused. Are they possible to exist on multiple invoices?
Reload doesn’t put it into the changesets once you are building changesets, and that is when it becomes an issue on the front end in the database, says Amos.
Amos is going to write a blog post about changeset because he could not find anything on the Internet that talked about it directly, and he is going to take another peruse through the Ecto documentation.
Normally, your validations are to a single field on your changeset, and if you are writing a custom validator, use validate change, and you can pass it a function that takes the details about that change on that field, says Sean.
Sean explains that all of the things we call validate those happen as soon as you call them but prepare changes like adding a function that will be called right before you call to update or insert or delete.
Amos has a function for signing up that versus inviting and signing up says - I am going to create a company, which is a very common thing in web apps.
You could even get a very long way into your app and only need one user per group or per team, but there is some overhead to thinking about how you appropriately hide that if you don’t need a multi-user multi-team or multi-group, says Sean.

3 Key Points
If you think about the database tables, delete is like on-cast on delete cascade. There is no analog, but you need to delete the associated record if you dissociate, says Sean.
When you get your response from your multi, you have to rebuild your form changeset out of that new response and send it out, which sometimes doesn’t build in the same way you want for actually displaying the first time, says Amos.
If Sean was building a new web app from scratch and it had some concept of or might feet in the future need some concept of teams, he would probably go ahead and build it from the beginning.

Tweetable Quotes
“I spent the last two weeks on the bugs in edge cases, and I guess they weren’t really edged cases.” – Amos
“When we want to remove something already existing, we have to keep changeset updated constantly with what is on the front end.” – Amos
“You can use getfield whenever you are working with existing things. Get change makes sense when you only care about the things being added.” – Sean
“There is some dissonance between I want to modify this one thing or I am modifying the collection and treating them as the same thing makes it complicated for you.” – Sean
“When I am trying to go back to a phoenix form versus if I am using a multi with something that is not Phoenix, there is no reason to go back to a changeset, and I need to display some error the user.” - Amos

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Elixir Outlaws, 19/02/2022

On today’s episode of the Elixir Outlaws, Chris Keathley and Sean Cribbs are going to talk about Embedded Systems, Microcontrollers, Rust, Raspberry Pi, Zig, etc. There is a compelling benefit of Rust, you can’t use this block of memory, and you can check that at compile time. There is a whole class of memory problems that Rust is stopping you from being able to interact with, but you kind of give it all up. If you dump the thing on a single-threaded, single-core M0 processor.

Episode Highlights
Zig is very appropriate for the embedded stuff, because if you are dealing with it, then you give up a lot of the benefits of Rust in an embedded context, says Chris.
There is a lot to work with Rust to, like write wrappers around unsafe type things to the point where you aren’t really getting a lot of its benefits.
There was a project in which Sean was working years ago that was leaning heavily on top of DPDK and which is the Data Plane Developer Kit. Basically, it lets you write network programs using kernel bypass. So, you basically get direct access to the network interface card, and it does some memory tricks and the network buffers into, huge pages that are user space rather than being, passed into kernel buffers and then hand it off with context switches into the userspace. So, you kind of gets the opportunity to do some packet-level programming there.
A whole class of problems could happen in a Zig Application that just can’t happen unless you use obviously giant caveat. On the other hand, Rust is going to keep you from making those mistakes.
Rust also has the notion of marking variables undefined, which was always a potential bug in C programs.
For those of you who don’t know, in old versions of C, you had to declare all your variables, you couldn’t declare them in scope, you couldn’t declare them, in your FOR loop, it had to be declared at a higher scope before you could use it in at least the version of C, which was like a pre ANSI.
Zig is an appropriate choice for the embedded work that Chris was doing, and he is starting to get into places where he really does want an arthouse like of some sort.
We are working on an API; its job is basically to produce these ginormous JSON documents and serve them to another app that produces the front end for our customers.
Sean could have switched back to Alexa or like Jason Library, but that would have made things worse, so there are still like times when you have to take that risky bet.
As a leader of an organization, you choose the culture you want, and then, based on that culture, you bring together people, and you tell them to make a decision, and then all you do is ratify that decision once they’ve come to a decision.
Sean recommends people to read the book “Kill It With Fire.” One of the things the author talks about is when there is a big problem, and they really want to solve it, the executives have to be into solving the problem. Sometimes they want to be to be involved, and they end up getting in the way. So, the strategy that she is picked in previous situations is they want to be involved, so they want to have a war room.
Chris has been in big company land where if you do anything without asking for permission in triplicate, you get your hands slapped.
There is a situation in mind where we are trying to figure out what the next major iteration of our platform is going to look like, and some of that means like questioning the assumptions that were made over the last three years building this product, and then you don’t like on the one hand we want to try things and see if they work like prototypes and whatnot and on the other hand, there is just a massive amount of functionality to figure out, says Chris
Chris is building new things then trying to get to the next level of the product.
Chris suggests that you can find everything you need if you search long and hard and kind of learn where it all is, it suffers mostly pedagogically like it doesn’t take you from nothing to an expert or even like semi knowledgeable. There is no path for that, and that is the thing that is really missing.
For Chris, coming back to an object-oriented language after being in functional land for so long, he gets really scared when he sees those sorts of things.
It is one of the few credo rules that Chris turns on from his laser stuff. He wants functions to have docs, and he wanted modules to have docs or at minimum have module block false, which is also again partially for he hides most of his internal modules.
You might change memory layout like your username is different than my username, and that changes the layout of how stuff gets into RAM, and that can result in a marked speed improvement.
Let’s use statistics and see our improvements are statistically relevant. Or if they are within the noise. If it is just noise, then try optimization Level 3, it is better than optimization level 2.
If we can find places in code, the problem with profilers as they show you where you spend all your time.

3 Key Points
Chris has written 50 to 100,000 lines of Rust at this point in various projects doing various things.
Sean and Chris discuss about the common problem in C language and how Zig is the much better version.
Rust is a better version of C++. C++ is a big old honking language at this point. Rust feels like that vein where it has a lot going on, setting aside the ownership stuff.

Tweetable Quotes
“All embedded microcontroller platform is a giant bag of global mutable state.”- Chris Keathley
“Rust compile-time memory safety stuff which is very novel and cool.” - Chris Keathley
“It is C that is keeping you from making some of the glaring C problems.”- Chris Keathley
“Zig appeals to me on an aesthetical level that Rust does not” - Chris Keathley
“Java is a safe bet because of adoption, not because of fitness to purpose.”- Sean

“If you are excited about it and getting invested in it, then that means a lot. It doesn’t eliminate risk, but it certainly helps to mitigate it when you make those big choices.” - Chris Keathley
“As a leader high up in an organization, you don’t make choices. You just bring together people who do make choices, and you ratify their choices.”- Chris Keathley
“Our team is responsible for some of the embedded work, which is largely built around nerves.” - Chris Keathley
“We have a deployment setup that’s really nice in that we can just use consistent hashing through a static cluster.” - Chris Keathley
“We made the loading spinner render faster, but it didn’t make loading any faster.” - Chris Keathley

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Elixir Outlaws, 09/02/2022

On today’s episode of the Elixir Outlaws, Amos and Sean are going to talk about what other models and frameworks are out there for building web apps. The plug has some stuff that looks like Sinatra, but the responses were not what Sean expected in some places. Many people recommended the web machine and the surprising elixir plug. A big point of a web machine is to build something that conforms to the semantics in the RFCs as much as possible. It’s kind of hard for most web frameworks Sean has used, aside from web machines.

Episode Highlights
In a web machine, your resources are the main thing you work with, and it is a module with a bunch of optional callbacks that you can implement. In a web machine, you have controllers, routers, and dispatch lists that you match over.
If you have designed the thing right, you can do that computation at a very low cost to the server. So you are generally improving things in terms of bandwidth, but you are also improving things in terms of time spent processing the request, says Sean.
The e-tags are a little bit more complicated, but you could do something like hash the contents of the record and use that as an E-tag. Sometimes you can’t, but that happens all before you even get to the point of producing content.
Elli is another great Erling Web server and what’s great about it is super tiny. You can do a lot with very, very little code, and like a phoenix or plug, it will compile your routes when you define them, explains Sean.
You can just give ELLI a list of functions, and it’ll run all of them and pass them whatever the output is from the previous function. The only requirement is your end handler because the thing attached to the route has to return particular keys in that map, suggests Amos.
Ease is a big deal for people. If you understand any language or server, you can get into this new language or new framework pretty easily with ease.
It’s hard to get started or figure out whenever you run into problems. The lifecycle stuff is spread out all over the documentation because sometimes you can change web sockets so that it’ll react, and sometimes you can’t flash messages the same way, says Amos.
When you are trying to load your timeline on the big social media websites, you get some placeholder thing first, and then they load in, and it displays, suggests Sean.
There are some limitations to the bandit framework yet. It’s not 100% complete, but it can probably work for most of the Phoenix things or plug things you want to do, says Sean.
When Amos first started looking into Erling, they looked into Erling for a communication server, not a web server.
Nitrogen hails from the days before we have WebSockets, but a lot of what it was trying to do is very much in line with things like live view things, says Sean.

3 Key Points
Many people know phoenix but don’t know Elixir, and similarly mid-teen people with Ruby projects don’t know Rails or don’t use the things that the language provides.
If you know Elixir well enough, the big Leap is not semantics for Erling, but the syntax. Erling doesn’t apply to Elixir because it made different choices, making the Erling web server less approachable to work on.
The flip side of nitrogen is that it’s inefficient to render the tricks that EEX does. Where it’s like I’m going to read everything up until this sigil, and that’s going to be one binary that gets submitted into the compiled function, says Sean.

Tweetable Quotes
“With rails, It was hard to do computation because you’d have to go all the way down into the controller and do all of the work you are going to do except rendering the page.’ - Sean
“If you focus on doing very little in each callback defined by the web machine, you get a snappy and compliant HTTP interface.” – Sean
“If your whole page is a live view and the initial render is even really just an empty template that maybe check some authentication to make sure that you are off.” - Amos

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Elixir Outlaws, 01/25/2021

On today’s episode of the Elixir Outlaws, Amos and Sean are going to share their technical knowledge and insight on various topics. Amos has been doing a lot of surface-ui work. The surface is a component library for live view. The surface has some excellent features built-in how they handle CSS. Sean hasn’t looked at the Template: Anchor yet, but he has heard mixed things about many people who feel like the eText templates have improved things.

Episode Highlights
The Troubles with form versus dot form feel like a limitation of the template language should unify those things, says Sean.
JSX - React said you could use HTML moments wherever you want, but we are going to turn them into our DOM construction functions that produce the objects with assigned properties from context, says Sean.
Sean recalls some web framework to underline called nitrogen used when it was called dynamic HTML, a sort of live update type stuff over Websockets.
If you have six elements, six-pointers, and probably at the front of that, you have some metadata, then the thing that follows this block in the OTP case is a tuple, says Sean.
A caveat is a kind of blockchain, because a caveat creates a new macaroon that wraps the old one with a new signature, and then you can add another restriction that wraps that one with a new one, says Amos.
Sean asks, would it make more sense not to put any permissions in macaroons unless you are restricting them to a limited set because the absence of a caveat is access?
Sean inquires, verifying a caveat is just like meeting the signature. If caveat doesn’t apply to an operation being performed, why would that be a problem in application logic?
We are storing passwords in the database, which we don’t need. We can make a macaroon for it and give it a time limit like this macaroon will not be any good after this specific time, says Amos.
Amos is going to store permissions in the macaroons, but he is not going to pull the list of projects out of the macaroon and then pull them out of the database.
The authorization context is not the initial set of facts. It’s the thing you want to unify, especially if there is a caveat for the items.
Sean asks Amos, what are your thoughts about code review, and what do you like or dislike about it? What are you trying to get out of it?
Everybody tends to hit the lowest bar set on a team no matter what. So code review, to me, is a place to try to push that bar up, says Amos.
Sean asks how effective is the code review itself, like the process you implement in your teams? And how often do you catch bugs?
Amos says that he feels like learning happens as long as it’s communication. Typos get caught a lot, especially in the documentation, because if somebody wrote documentation, we can read it in the code review and catch typos.
Reviewing something to understand how our product is put together or how our infrastructure is put together has not been that good for me, says Sean.
As per Amos, if a senior asked the question, a junior will often assume that is how they should go. But once a junior person sees that they know something that you don’t know, it adjusts the power dynamic.
Amos suggests that for a good team, we need vulnerability. And the hardest thing to create remotely is vulnerability because there is a lot of interaction that doesn’t happen.
Amos affirms that if you can’t explain the code in the code review, you probably haven’t done it well enough for consideration. In his opinion, people don’t spend enough time on code reviews.

3 Key Points
A lot of the JSX - React projects Sean had to interact with use Storybook, and Amos creates examples for each of your components, and it is a good thing that helps them with documentation.
Authorization is always contextual. When you want to compare or make an authorization decision, you have to look at the context that Sean is trying to authorize and what rights have been granted.
Code review is for both sides of the reviewer and the person or people whose code is being reviewed as it takes vulnerability on both sides.

Tweetable Quotes
“When you are a property type, and you have a component, you can define properties, and you can say whether they’re required or not.” - Amos
“If I have to debug something, I look at a record. When you are debugging, it is because you don’t know what’s going on.” - Amos
“If someone tried to navigate to the URL without the macaroon, they would just get denied, and that would be a perfect use case for macarons.” - Sean
“With datalog in Prolog, you can declare things that look like functions in datalog, usually called facts or functors, and they have nobody.” – Sean
“Celebrate failures that create learning. You don’t celebrate failures if you keep continuing to have the same one over and over.” - Amos

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Elixir Outlaws, 01/19/2021

On today’s episode of the Elixir Outlaws, Sean Cribbs and Amos will talk about WASM (Web assembly) to implement some core parts of the app and discuss the server-side too. Rusts for loop syntax is sugar for iterators, says Sean. So, you can also sort of do method chaining type thing in rust. There is an interesting proposal on the Elixir form for loops.

Episode Highlights
FOR loops are not loops, they are a special form in the compiler, basically a macro with special privileges that generates some code, says Sean.
As per Sean, if you have a lead, then you have for loop variable, and you have to return a two-two pole that has the accumulator as the second, or if you don’t, then it is just the accumulator that becomes quite confusing.
Amos says that when one uses MapReduce and has FOR loop and you want to step through something and maybe at the same time get an account and a sum, and you want to adjust the current values, then we are getting three things out in adjustment and then two other data points.
It is hard to step away from an imperative mindset when you have done it forever and adding imperative things back into the language is going to make it even harder for people to step outside of that imperative mindset, says Amos.
People use Monads to write things that look more imperative because it is easier for us to think that way sometimes, and it’s going to create less maintainable code.
OCaml is very much like in the same syntactical flavor as Haskell. But it doesn’t have that whole lazy evaluation thing that gets so confusing at times, and it also has the much simpler type of system.
Sean had tried hard to encourage his coworkers to use things like in the lists module or use list comprehensions or use fold wherever they could. But some people liked making software recursive functions that had a bunch of arguments to them.
In MapReduce there is a trailing option you can put on for loops. It is like reducing given initial value of the accumulator and then you match the accumulator coming in.
Using ENUM reduce, there are some tactical forms that represent something, and special form will generate, but they are not things in themselves.
The things that are browser based we can’t rewrite completely in Rust. There is always going to be JavaScript at some level.
Sean has seen attempts where people want to have JavaScript running the same code on the front end as in the back end.
In graphic production, there are many things about memory allocators, but these are all sorts of things that we might have to think about with rust when we are trying to implement.

3 Key Points
With MapReduce in the ENUM module, you can do something on each element of the collection, but you are also collecting something about the entire collection as you flow through, says Sean.
The flipside of list comprehension is that you can only do so many things in the right side of the comprehension. It may be explicit what you were returning from expression because the entire expression is inside the list brackets.
The biggest thing that Amos have ever had to deal with when working on stuff on the front end or on edge computing is if you don’t control the resource at the endpoint, it may be the slowest thing ever, and it may not work that well.

Tweetable Quotes
“I am not against pipes, and you can write non-imperative code with pipes, but it looks imperative.” – Amos
“In FOR loop, FOR is an expression that returns a value. You can choose to ignore that value that’s returned, but it returns a value, usually a list.” – Sean
“You can have only one let, which is the other thing that’s a little bit surprising. It works in if statements.” – Sean
“Being able to have code on the back end, you control the hardware and the performance.” – Amos
“The book Kill it with fire I wish I had picked up a year ago because the author worked for US digital service, updating mainframe applications, and there’s a lot of sage advice in that book.” - Sean

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On today’s episode of the Elixir Outlaws, Sean Cribbs and Amos King are going to talk about Sports of Sorts. Amos shares some driving wisdom and his fondness for silent thoughts. Sean and Amos will share some random and interesting experiences.

Episode Highlights:
Amos reveals how he developed his creativity and problem-solving skills from driving.
Sean has recently resigned from his job, and he is about to join a new company after 12 days.
As per Sean, one spends a lot of your time sleeping because their dreams help them to work through problems
Amos loves jogging around the river next to the hotel early in the morning when nobody is up. For him, it is nice and quiet.
Brittany Matthews is a co-owner of the women's soccer team. She has been big in promoting women’s sports in Kansas City, but especially soccer, and Patrick and Brittany broke ground on a new training center earlier this year. Then, three or four weeks ago, they revealed their new team name.
The stadium is first of its kind for the women’s soccer team, which is huge because this team has only been here a year. They just announced that they were going to have a team this January 2021.
For those not in Kansas City, the streetcar is absolutely free , which is really awesome with all the buses because buses are free too. So you can go anywhere for free in Kansas City.
We have one of the best women soccer players in Samuels who has been on the national team. An Incredible midfielder, dynamic player, and she is going be exciting to watch, says Sean.
While talking about the new company where Sean is going to join. He explains that the company is doing motion graphics or motion design.
People really want the ability to collaborate to provide feedback on designs, work on different iterations, compare them, and build out a portfolio for you, says Sean.
There are multiple companies out there called Fable, so if you want to go look it up, it is Fable, not Fable dot IO, not fable com. It is the Fable Dot app. It is one of those easy, easy ones to find.
Amos says he doesn’t know how possible it would be, but it would be interesting if, two designers could work on the same like image or animation at the same time, doing the same kind of ideas of passing changes back and forth.
Part of the reason why Sean’s friend wanted to hire him is because he has distributed systems experience, where all the bodies are buried, where all the problems are gonna be like what if we want to have real time collaboration or like something like Miro where people are dragging things around on the on the project at the same time.
What always kills me on the front end in the browser, or even if you are compiling and making things faster, is that you really have zero control over the quality of the computer it is running on and the problems like the interactions between the things, says Amos.
Sean says that they are going to write C+ code because it was mostly C code, but using the C ++compiler and very few features of C and like the Windows API and like working with it directly to build a 2D kind of Zelda light game.
Sean says that the JavaScript community is huge. You have a lot of people experience in JavaScript. It doesn’t take that many of them to make a good customization.
Amos shares that his first editor for code other than the QBasic editor was Emacs and that was 22 years ago.
Amos says that his first experience with C not running everywhere was in an AI class and they had to write a chess engine and then they all played the developed chess engines against each other.
Sean says there is a bytecode format that you can take from running on a Intel being VM and run it on an ARM beam VM or on some other processor that is running your nerves project.

3 Key Points
Those of you who don’t know anything about Kansas City, but Patrick Mahomes is a big deal here quarterback for the Chiefs and his fiance Brittany Matthews is kind of influential in her own.
Sean says that Figma has changed the way people do collaborate on static web design, this is going to be collaboration on motion design. Motion design would include things like just regular animations you might see on the web. It could include things like advertisements, logo, animations.
There are a lot of different ways that we could do collaborate. Another area that he talked about us wanting to do is so a lot of this is like you do in the browser, You draw your shapes, you animate them you set the keyframes, you know you set all that stuff up. But that only produces us a level of quality that the browser can produce. But if you want to do 4K video of this animation that you just created, you are not going to produce that with your browser, says Sean.

Tweetable Quotes
“I am a big fan of silent thoughts” – Sean
“When they introduce the team that the players that are going to start for the match. They had some incredible motion designs on the video board.“- Sean
“It is not movies, it is more about the animation than about video editing. It is like making an animated logo.” - Sean
“There are some pretty interesting problems how to isolate yourself from these, they are doing something very quick and then suddenly they open another program on their desktop, but that hangup.” – Amos
“90% of your life was spent formatting exactly how that professor wanted it formatted, which is like a huge waste of time.” - Amos

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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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How does context affect the software we write?

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A transcript for this episode is available on Binary Noggin's website: https://binarynoggin.com/blog/episode-101-bright-and-tight/

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A transcript is available for this episode on Binary Noggin's website: https://binarynoggin.com/blog/episode-99-big-tubes/

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• Quinn Wilton on Behaviours

A transcript of this episode is available on Binary Noggin's website: https://binarynoggin.com/blog/episode-98-machine-laundering/

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• Is Github's Copilot possibly infringing copyright?

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• Good and Bad Elixir

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Special Guests: Collins Mucheru, Shuaib Afegubua, and Sigu Magwa.

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Shout outs to Friends of The Show : Frank Herbert and Mitch Hanberg.

https://www.mitchellhanberg.com/projects/

https://twitter.com/mononcqc

A transcript is available for this episode on Binary Noggin's website: https://binarynoggin.com/blog/episode-90-ad-hoc-ly-specified/

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Chris claims to have a specific design sense but has no idea if its a good sense or not. Both he and Amos agree that consistency is important and that software developers should always be working to making the design of a system a little bit better. But, that work also seems hard and its way more fun to play around with Istio or whatever.

A transcript is available for this episode on Binary Noggin's website: https://binarynoggin.com/blog/episode-89-the-new-new-architecture/

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• Breaking Mnesia

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• Hybrid Logical Clock overview
• Toniq Systems HLC
• k-sortable definition
• Consistency Models

At the end, Chris teases his latest project which may or may not ever be seen by other people.

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This week, Amos and Chris discuss planning for failures, overload, distributed transactions, and resilience.

A transcript is available for this episode on Binary Noggin's website: https://binarynoggin.com/blog/episode-84-the-g-stands-for-garbage/

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They discuss when its better to build your own solution, TLA+, fountain pens, and writing letters.

A transcript is available for this episode on Binary Noggin's website: https://binarynoggin.com/blog/episode-83-the-seven-levels-of-shell/

Special Guest: Jeff Weiss.

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It turns out that Chris is currently using LiveView. The consensus is that LiveView is pretty cool even though it took 4 hours to get a modal to work.

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The main topic kicks off around the 22 minute mark. Amos is hiring and wants advice on how to conduct better interviews.

A transcript is available for this episode on Binary Noggin's website: https://binarynoggin.com/blog/episode-81-thats-not-math/

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The main discussion is about modeling problems using data structures instead of processes. The guys agree that manipulating data with pure functions is a good thing and that the tricky part is where to put this data when you’re done. Chris cautions against the desire to put all of your data into a single global process. Databases are sucky global variables, but at least they’re global variables with rules.

A transcript is available for this episode on Binary Noggin's website: https://binarynoggin.com/blog/episode-80-the-ish-is-what-matters/

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Links:

• Roll20
• The Single Global Process

The conversation turns to contracting and how contracting is different than working for a product company (beyond the obvious tax implications). Chris believes that product companies only pay contractors when they absolutely have to.

The main topic this week is software quality, if thats even a real thing, and if it is, how do we get more of it?

A transcript is available for this episode on Binary Noggin's website: https://binarynoggin.com/blog/episode-79-providing-value/

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• Moonlander Keyboard

Mercifully, the conversation quickly shifts when Chris solicits feedback from the other hosts on his notion that business logic isn't a Real Thing :tm:. Anna and Amos discuss the degree to which Chris might be a pedant. The show wraps up with a discussion on how to change the way programmers can grow and think differently about problems.

A transcript is available for this episode on Binary Noggin's website: https://binarynoggin.com/blog/episode-78-strategically-planned-coffees/

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• Keathley

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On the way out the door, the guys talk about Dune, Baby Yoda, and what makes for a good Dungeon Master.

A transcript is available for this episode here: https://binarynoggin.com/blog/episode-73-a-very-forgetful-god/

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Transcript is avaiable as a blog on Binary Noggin's website: https://binarynoggin.com/blog/episode-72-now-you-know-what-a-monad-is/

Special Guests: Connor Rigby and Martin Gausby.

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Everyone talk's about their anxieties and how the pandemic is affecting their lives. They share a few ways to escape from the stress of isolation.

Also slack’s new UI is hella weird.

A transcript of this episode is available on Binary Noggin's website: https://binarynoggin.com/blog/episode-70-the-gardening-outlaws/

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• Tuple
• Screen.so
• The Flop House

Congratulations to Eric on the birth of his first child.

Video recording of this episode available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eM5ceRmFig&t=848s

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Special Guests: Bruce Tate, Justus Eapen, Susumu Yamazaki, Tim Mecklem, and  Melvin Cedeno.

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Special Guest: Steve Bussey.

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• Real-Time Phoenix

Finally Amos brings up the southern tradition of Hoppin’ John. Which is boring and you can easily skip it.

The host want to get questions from you! So send those to us via the feedback form on our website or message us on twitter: @ElixirOutlaws

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Amos attempts to talk through the new features in Elixir 1.10 while Chris constantly interjects, makes jokes and generally tries everyone’s patience. Eventually Chris settles down long enough to have a real conversation. The hosts describe the benefits of Elixir becoming a stable and boring choice. They also make fun of Go.

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Amos has been working with GenStage and Broadway. Chris knows nothing about Broadway and hasn’t ever found a problem that needed GenStage.

Chris theorizes that the reason people use processes for their business entities is because they don’t have other chances to use processes.

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Chris is building RPC to see if it helps solve some of the coordination issues that he's experiencing at work. The conversation moves to the concept of autonomy and leverage in software systems and how to help teams align on larger goals.

Dave's latest talk from GigCity is referenced and Chris expounds on his love for Datalog.

Finally the hosts indulge in multiple divergences in which they divulge information about their personal lives.

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Links:

• Unison

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Links:

• ElixirConf videos

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The conversation moves to circuit breakers and common patterns for handling overload in service calls.

Chris and Amos wrap up with some tips for debugging production problems with the scientific method.

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Links:

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• Datomic
• Adaptive Queues for handling overload

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Topics covered: design by contract, norm, going remote, communicating complex systems, pairing, interesting features for elixir, frustrations with the community, and why he continues to do this podcast.

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Links:

• ex_contract
• norm
• tmate

Norm - Specify data shape for validation and generation

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The hosts discuss the benefits of moderating a community. They all agree that moderation is a good thing and helps a community stay healthy, but they also agree that silently editing people's posts is like, kinda creepy.

Anna brings up the topic of “forever projects” and how draining they can be. She asks the guys if they have any solutions for scaling projects that don't have a defined "end". The hosts discuss burnout, the pain of invisible work, and how people can help create a more vibrant and rich community.

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Amos is trying to figure out the best way to give back to the community. The discussion moves towards the social contracts of open source which Chris thinks is a thorny topic. Chris encourages people to contribute in whatever way they feel is best even if it means not writing code.

Chris rails against the programming communities obsession with hero culture and the toxicity of “rockstar programmers”. The guys discuss ways to try to build successful teams. Spoilers: the first step is not to hire a bunch of people who want to build RPC when all you need is a blog.

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• Stages of team development

Anna describes her longest Monday ever and Amos explains why he can’t sleep on planes. Chris has been doing nothing exciting besides not sleeping and keeping his children alive. The conversation moves to design by contract and data specification layers. Chris discusses the libraries he’s been working on and also does a pretty great internet voice.

Chris and Anna talk about their upcoming elixirconf talks and how they’re happy to see more diversity in the speaker lineup for elixirconf. This leads to a discussion of other conferences and how they pick speakers. Finally the hosts wrap up with a pitch for LazyRiverConf occurring simultaneously with ElixirConf.

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During the main topic Amos describes a problem he’s having with Tesla and Hackney. This leads to a discussion about how to build systems that can handle failure. Amos brings up Let It Crash and where it applies. Chris provides some insights into building stable systems and how supervisors influence design.

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The main topic this week is observability. This topic is motivated by Amos’s latest book: Behind Human Error. Amos provides a brief rundown and Chris talks with authority about things he really doesn't understand. The guys discuss the importance of setting goals for your services and how those goals will inform your metrics gathering and alerting strategies. The show wraps up with some tips on benchmarking and profiling.

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Links:

• The Art of Computer Systems Performance Analysis: Techniques for Experimental Design, Measurement, Simulation, and Modeling
• Little's Law
• Behind Human Error

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Hey everyone, we're still wrestling with audio gremlins. This week is based on the raw audio from our call so you'll hear some artifacts in there. I just wanted you to be aware in case you're sensitive to that kind of thing. We've solved this problem so going forward this shouldn't happen again.

-Keathley

Notes

This week starts with some serious discussion about the nature of hammocks, podcasts, and the Coriolis effect.

The main topic this week is implicit vs. explicit. Chris argues that an implicit apis tend to be better apis. The hosts discuss where the lines should be drawn between making an operation explicit and hiding the internal complexity of the system. Chris describes how we should think about building a system in layers and how to avoid breaking changes.

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Chris takes control of the show and does a hard pivot towards the main topic this week; the overuse of processes and state management. Chris explains that most people can get by with a lot less OTP then they think. He and Amos discuss ways that they see OTP misused or overused, the nature of scaling systems and the dangers of building stateful services.

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Special Guest: Bruce Tate.

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Conference rundown and teaching distributed systems with Chris and Anna.

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Hey y'all audio from this week is a little worse then usual. We needed to use the backup audio file for technical reasons. Just wanted to provide a heads up.

-keathley

Show notes

This weeks starts with a discussion of how to have meaningful conversations about design decisions. Chris asks whether programming best practices are for individuals or for teams. This leads to a discussion about team dynamics and how to facilitate productive conversations in teams. The hosts end with some tips on facilitating better communication and openness in team environments.

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• How to solve it

Anna joins half-way through and provides an impromptu opinion on umbrella applications. She provides a status update on the goings on of San Francisco and its current weather patterns.

Chris and Amos finish up with a recap of their discussions and some ways that they grow systems over time.

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Fred discusses his motivations for writing, maven plugins, and how to write better property based tests. He also shares some opinions on code coverage, test driven development, and elixir’s pipe operators.

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Special Guest: Fred Hebert.

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Links:

• Fred Hebert (@mononcqc) | Twitter
• Property-Based Testing with PropEr, Erlang, and Elixir: Find Bugs Before Your Users Do by Fred Hebert
• ferd.ca
• Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good!
• xp challenge

After this the conversation moves towards Saša’s custom CI service he’s been building. Saša explains the major benefits of using elixir and erlang for these sorts of tasks. He talks about his dream of being able to utilize erlang with no other dependencies.

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Special Guest: Saša Jurić.

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• We had to sleep in corridor
• Elixir in Action
• To spawn, or not to spawn

The main topic this week is Private Modules. Chris doesn’t think his opinion matters but Amos wants to talk about it anyway. Amos doesn’t know why we need this so Chris tries to provide some context. This eventually leads to a conversation on warnings and how they get surfaced in Elixir. Chris maintains that he’s ambivalent and Amos wants to think about it more. At the end of the show Chris provides some pretty great tips for getting over stage fright before a talk.

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Links:

• spacemacs
• org-mode
• Helm
• Projectile
• This Agile Life
• Getting Things Done
• Private Modules discussion

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Links:

• Dialyxir
• Recon Trace
• mix test.watch
• Crucial Conversations
• focused vs diffused thinking
• This Agile Life

Hey y’all it’s Chris. Just wanted you to know that we had a bunch of technical issues with this call. Both mine and Anna’s recordings were corrupted somehow. We’re still looking into why. Because of this the audio quality changes at around the 20 minute mark. We fell back to using the zoom call audio which we typically only use as a reference for lining up all of the other tracks. I just wanted you to know in case you’re sensitive to that kinda thing.

Notes

This week kicks off with a discussion of the holidays, the plight of climate change, and the impending loss of Florida. Amos steers the conversation back towards elixir and his experience building a shell for his current client. Chris describe’s his current experience writing Rust. While he acknowledges that Rust is a good language he doesn’t feel like Rust elevates the paradigm of programming enough. Amos asks the other hosts what they look for in packages or libraries. This leads to a discussion of how to design deeper apis while leveraging stateless operations. Chris explains how they’re using stateless patterns in vapor.

Elixir cards are available by tweeting at @elixiroutlaws and @elixircards on twitter with the hashtag #vapor. You can explain to Chris why he's wrong about rust or whatever.

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This leads to a discussion about good ways to build modules and libraries that can be easily taught to newcomers.

A copy of this episode is available to read as a blog, here: https://binarynoggin.com/blog/episode-23-reaching-understanding/

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Links:

• The Hard Parts of Open Source - Evan Czaplicki