Dan Ivovich's guest appearances

Dan Ivovich

Elixir Wizards

Chris Bell

Angel Jose

Dave Thomas

Toran Billups

Cassidy Williams

Chris Miller

Dan Lindeman

Jessica Kerr

Devon Estes

José Valim

Chris McCord

Francesco Cesarini

Sean Lewis

Jim Freeze

Brooklyn Zelenka

OwlTail

On today's show, we are joined by Dan Ivovich from our team here at SmartLogic! Dan is the Director of Development Operations and has already been a guest and cohost a few times on the show. Today we are talking about hiring and training and his experience with these tasks at the company and especially concerning Elixir. We discuss the challenges Dan has faced in recruiting and the ways in which SmartLogic has lined up resumes and possible candidates through events and meetups. Dan explains some of the difficulties that are common for programmers transitioning into Elixir and how the company approaches the tasks of onboarding and ongoing support. We also get into Dan's favorite resources and tools for staying abreast of Elixir and his recommendations for practices to learn fast as a newcomer before he explains how he thinks about continual learning and expanding his own skillset. The conversation finishes with some thoughts and reflections on functional programming from our guest, so make sure to tune in for all of that and more! Key Points From This Episode:  Dan's role at SmartLogic and how he leads the team.  Recruiting new employees; collecting resumes and attending events.  Challenges posed by recruiting good Elixir programmers and who to look for. Sticking points for people transitioning into Elixir from other languages.  The stack at SmartLogic and the number of projects based in Elixir.  Onboarding at the company; skills that are transferable to Elixir.  Professional development and ongoing support for team members.  Dan's favorite tools and resources for learning Elixir.  Continual learning and Dan's strategies for growing his skillset. A simple definition of functional programming and Dan's early experiences with it.   Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode: SmartLogic — https://smartlogic.io/  Dan Ivovich — https://www.danivovich.com/ Dan Ivovich on Twitter — https://twitter.com/danivovich ElixirConf — https://elixirconf.com/events Java — https://www.java.com/ Ruby — https://www.ruby-lang.org/ Python — https://www.python.org/ Rails — https://rubyonrails.org/ Rust — https://www.rust-lang.org/ GO — https://golang.org/ Twitch — https://www.twitch.tv/ Bruce Tate — https://codesync.global/speaker/bruce-tate/ Scala — https://www.scala-lang.org/Special Guest: Dan Ivovich.

On today's show, we are joined by Dan Ivovich from our team here at SmartLogic! Dan is the Director of Development Operations and has already been a guest and cohost a few times on the show. Today we are talking about hiring and training and his experience with these tasks at the company and especially concerning Elixir. We discuss the challenges Dan has faced in recruiting and the ways in which SmartLogic has lined up resumes and possible candidates through events and meetups. Dan explains some of the difficulties that are common for programmers transitioning into Elixir and how the company approaches the tasks of onboarding and ongoing support. We also get into Dan's favorite resources and tools for staying abreast of Elixir and his recommendations for practices to learn fast as a newcomer before he explains how he thinks about continual learning and expanding his own skillset. The conversation finishes with some thoughts and reflections on functional programming from our guest, so make sure to tune in for all of that and more! Key Points From This Episode: <ul> <li>Dan's role at SmartLogic and how he leads the team. </li> <li>Recruiting new employees; collecting resumes and attending events. </li> <li>Challenges posed by recruiting good Elixir programmers and who to look for. </li> <li>Sticking points for people transitioning into Elixir from other languages. </li> <li>The stack at SmartLogic and the number of projects based in Elixir. </li> <li>Onboarding at the company; skills that are transferable to Elixir. </li> <li>Professional development and ongoing support for team members. </li> <li>Dan's favorite tools and resources for learning Elixir. </li> <li>Continual learning and Dan's strategies for growing his skillset.</li> <li>A simple definition of functional programming and Dan's early experiences with it. </li> </ul> Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode: SmartLogic — <a href="https://smartlogic.io/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://smartlogic.io/</a> Dan Ivovich — <a href="https://www.danivovich.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://www.danivovich.com/</a> Dan Ivovich on Twitter — <a href="https://twitter.com/danivovich" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://twitter.com/danivovich</a> ElixirConf — <a href="https://elixirconf.com/events" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://elixirconf.com/events</a> Java — <a href="https://www.java.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://www.java.com/</a> Ruby — <a href="https://www.ruby-lang.org/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://www.ruby-lang.org/</a> Python — <a href="https://www.python.org/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://www.python.org/</a> Rails — <a href="https://rubyonrails.org/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://rubyonrails.org/</a> Rust — <a href="https://www.rust-lang.org/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://www.rust-lang.org/</a> GO — <a href="https://golang.org/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://golang.org/</a> Twitch — <a href="https://www.twitch.tv/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://www.twitch.tv/</a> Bruce Tate — <a href="https://codesync.global/speaker/bruce-tate/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://codesync.global/speaker/bruce-tate/</a> Scala — <a href="https://www.scala-lang.org/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://www.scala-lang.org/</a>Special Guest: Dan Ivovich.

Dan Ivovich from SmartLogic on Hiring and Training

We talk with developers from the team here at SmartLogic about our current practices on deploying Elixir and Phoenix in production. Dan Ivovich - Director of Development Operations @ SmartLogic Learn more about how SmartLogic uses Phoenix and Elixir. 00:00 - Fade In 00:30 - Introductions to Eric, Dan and SmartLogic Dan Ivovich - Director of Development Operations @ SmartLogic Eric Oestrich - Developer, Elixir Lead @ SmartLogic Justus Eapen - Full stack developer @ SmartLogic Introduced to Elixir by an old colleague.  1:20 - What Elixir projects do you have in production?  Several client projects in production. Several Mobile Apps with APIs powered by Phoenix and Elixir.  Baltimore Water Taxi.  A digital marketplace. And more! 1:57 - Advantages and disadvantages to using Elixir. We made the switch when a colleague was stoked about Functional Programming and introduced us to Elixir. We were won over by the performance and rich feature sets, OTP, etc. 2:43 - Where are we hosting our Elixir Apps?  Heroku  AWS  Linode  Digital Ocean   6:20Deployment process, tools, scripting  Ansible - for underlying VPS’s, servers, and more recently deployment itself. (Similar to Capistrano). Distillery Mix.release   7:18 - Zero Downtime Deployments  Old school load balancers and rolling restarts   7:46 - What are the performance metrics like? Comparatively.  Ruby ends up with memory leaks. That doesn’t happen with Elixir.  Memory utilization is flat and low no matter what.  “Phenomenal response times”   8:54 - How does Eric think about clustered applications in Elixir?  Going Multi Node (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCUKQnkjajo)  Pg2 - process groups  Mnesia distributed database (beware!)  “Just sending messages to pids because Erlang is great”  Swarm / Horde   12:40 - How do we handle background tasks?  Started with verk  Recently becoming more comfortable with spinning up GenServers  “The language itself is built to be concurrent.”   15:06 What libraries are we using in prod?  First thing: You don’t need a whole lot because the language is so well designed.  Phoenix - web framework  Ecto - sort of an ORM  Distillery - for releases  Bamboo - for sending emails  Quantum - for task scheduling  Timex - for dates and times, and timezones  Cachex - for caching   18:20- What third party integrations have we attempted  Stripe  Square  Twilio  Mindbody   Always building our own clients.  Using HTTPoison 19:58Has Elixir ever saved the day in production? It’s saved many days by PREVENTING ISSUES. Systems are architected for reliability and fault-tolerance. 21:48 - Where do supervision trees come from? What is OTP?  OTP is an Erlang standard lib  Includes supervision trees, genservers, ETS, and a lot of stuff we don’t even know about!  gen_tcp  Mnesia  dets   23:43- Tips for devs considering running elixir in production.  Jump in and read the docs  Understand how systems boot, distillery releases, config providers, etc.  “Good server monitoring hygiene”  “DIVE IN!”  19:54 Outro  Learn more about how SmartLogic uses Phoenix and Elixir.Special Guest: Dan Ivovich.Links:Going Multi-NodePG2mnesiaSwarmHordeVerkBambooQuantumCachex

We talk with developers from the team here at SmartLogic about our current practices on deploying Elixir and Phoenix in production. Dan Ivovich - Director of Development Operations @ SmartLogic Learn more about how SmartLogic uses <a href="https://smartlogic.io/phoenix-and-elixir" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Phoenix and Elixir.</a> 00:00 - Fade In 00:30 - Introductions to Eric, Dan and SmartLogic Dan Ivovich - Director of Development Operations @ SmartLogic Eric Oestrich - Developer, Elixir Lead @ SmartLogic Justus Eapen - Full stack developer @ SmartLogic Introduced to Elixir by an old colleague. 1:20 - What Elixir projects do you have in production? Several client projects in production. Several Mobile Apps with APIs powered by Phoenix and Elixir. Baltimore Water Taxi. A digital marketplace. And more! 1:57 - Advantages and disadvantages to using Elixir. We made the switch when a colleague was stoked about Functional Programming and introduced us to Elixir. We were won over by the performance and rich feature sets, OTP, etc. 2:43 - Where are we hosting our Elixir Apps? <ul> <li>Heroku </li> <li>AWS </li> <li>Linode </li> <li>Digital Ocean </li> </ul> 6:20Deployment process, tools, scripting <ul> <li>Ansible - for underlying VPS’s, servers, and more recently deployment itself. (Similar to Capistrano). </li> <li>Distillery </li> <li>Mix.release </li> </ul> 7:18 - Zero Downtime Deployments <ul> <li>Old school load balancers and rolling restarts </li> </ul> 7:46 - What are the performance metrics like? Comparatively. <ul> <li>Ruby ends up with memory leaks. That doesn’t happen with Elixir. </li> <li>Memory utilization is flat and low no matter what. </li> <li>“Phenomenal response times” </li> </ul> 8:54 - How does Eric think about clustered applications in Elixir? <ul> <li>Going Multi Node (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCUKQnkjajo" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCUKQnkjajo</a>) </li> <li><a href="http://erlang.org/doc/man/pg2.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Pg2</a> - process groups </li> <li><a href="http://erlang.org/doc/man/mnesia.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Mnesia</a> distributed database (beware!) </li> <li>“Just sending messages to pids because Erlang is great” </li> <li><a href="https://github.com/bitwalker/swarm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Swarm</a> / <a href="https://github.com/derekkraan/horde" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Horde</a> </li> </ul> 12:40 - How do we handle background tasks? <ul> <li>Started with <a href="https://github.com/edgurgel/verk" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">verk</a> </li> <li>Recently becoming more comfortable with spinning up <a href="https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/GenServer.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">GenServers</a> </li> <li>“The language itself is built to be concurrent.” </li> </ul> 15:06 What libraries are we using in prod? <ul> <li>First thing: You don’t need a whole lot because the language is so well designed. </li> <li><a href="https://phoenixframework.org/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Phoenix</a> - web framework </li> <li><a href="https://hexdocs.pm/ecto/Ecto.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Ecto</a> - sort of an ORM </li> <li><a href="https://github.com/bitwalker/distillery" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Distillery</a> - for releases </li> <li><a href="https://github.com/thoughtbot/bamboo" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Bamboo</a> - for sending emails </li> <li><a href="https://github.com/c-rack/quantum-elixir" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Quantum</a> - for task scheduling </li> <li><a href="https://github.com/bitwalker/timex" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Timex</a> - for dates and times, and timezones </li> <li><a href="https://github.com/whitfin/cachex" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Cachex</a> - for caching </li> </ul> 18:20- What third party integrations have we attempted <ul> <li>Stripe </li> <li>Square </li> <li>Twilio </li> <li>Mindbody </li> </ul> Always building our own clients.  Using <a href="https://github.com/edgurgel/httpoison" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">HTTPoison</a> 19:58Has Elixir ever saved the day in production? It’s saved many days by PREVENTING ISSUES. Systems are architected for reliability and fault-tolerance. 21:48 - Where do supervision trees come from? What is OTP? <ul> <li>OTP is an Erlang standard lib </li> <li>Includes supervision trees, genservers, ETS, and a lot of stuff we don’t even know about! </li> <li><a href="http://erlang.org/doc/man/gen_tcp.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">gen_tcp</a> </li> <li>Mnesia </li> <li><a href="http://erlang.org/doc/man/dets.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">dets</a> </li> </ul> 23:43- Tips for devs considering running elixir in production. <ul> <li>Jump in and read the docs </li> <li>Understand how systems boot, distillery releases, config providers, etc. </li> <li>“Good server monitoring hygiene” </li> <li>“DIVE IN!” 19:54 Outro</li> </ul> Learn more about how SmartLogic uses <a href="https://smr.tl/2Hyslu8" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Phoenix and Elixir.</a>Special Guest: Dan Ivovich.Links:<ul><li><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCUKQnkjajo" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Going Multi-Node</a></li><li><a href="http://erlang.org/doc/man/pg2.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">PG2</a></li><li><a href="http://erlang.org/doc/man/mnesia.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">mnesia</a></li><li><a href="https://github.com/bitwalker/swarm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Swarm</a></li><li><a href="https://github.com/derekkraan/horde" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Horde</a></li><li><a href="https://github.com/edgurgel/verk" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Verk</a></li><li><a href="https://github.com/thoughtbot/bamboo" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Bamboo</a></li><li><a href="https://github.com/quantum-elixir/quantum-core" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Quantum</a></li><li><a href="https://github.com/whitfin/cachex" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Cachex</a></li></ul>

Dan Ivovich from SmartLogic - Elixir in Production