Adi and Allen join this week's panelist episode. They dive into the vibrant Elixir community and explore the importance of open communication and feedback. From the struggles of casual conversation to the excitement of discussing technology, they uncover some interesting stories.

Allen (00:01.174)

Hello everybody. Welcome to an episode of Elixir Mix. I'm your host, Alan Wima. And today on the panel we have Adi Eingart. And that's it for this week. We thought with kind of the upcoming code beam happening in Berlin this year in October, right? It's coming up quite quick. About the mid to, yeah, the middle of October. So I think it's the 20th and 21st of October, if I remember correctly. You know, we thought we'd talk about, you know...

 

Adi (00:08.596)

Hello.

 

Allen (00:31.182)

previous code beams and other conferences in elixir. I think we just had elixir conf, right? The videos just came out, I've been watching those. I haven't been to any beam conferences ever. Oh no, sorry. I went to one other conference in my life, was actually in Taiwan. It was elixir and Ruby conference. It was a very weird conference, right? Because Taiwan has this, well, it's kind of interesting because Taiwan's very close to Japan and that's obviously where the creator of Ruby lives and from.

 

And Taiwan has a weird history with Japan, right? So a lot of their, there's a lot of Japanese influence because of the history. And there's a lot of Ruby developers in Taiwan. So they did this Ruby plus Elixir thing. And I think like 95% of the people there were all for Ruby, including two of my colleagues that went with me over there.

 

But I was totally there just for Elixir, so it was nice because Jose was there. Got to meet him and nobody else I could remember that was kind of up in the community at the time. Like there was no Chris McCord or anybody else I could remember. But of course, like I said, Mats was there. His crew was there. He had this like entourage of other Japanese developers with him. So it was quite interesting. I still remember like one thing stuck into my head, right?

 

Adi (01:28.916)

Nice.

 

Adi (01:51.316)

Nice.

 

Allen (01:54.87)

Basically, as I said, 95% of the people there were all for Ruby. Matt grabs his lunch. I think we all had like a tray lunch and we ate in like a cafeteria kind of setting. And he's looking around like, where should he sit? And he looked like, you know, like your first day at a new school, you know, you don't know where to sit, you don't know which table will accept you. And I'm thinking to myself like,

 

You guys, like you have the creator of Ruby here, your favorite programming language, this is what everybody comes here for nearly. And you don't want to eat with this guy, you don't ask him to sit down. So I flagged him down and he sat next to me and I had a very awesome lunch with the creator of Ruby, which I'm still a fan of Ruby. But like, I was just surprised, nobody took the opportunity to just flag him down and say, hey, sit over here, let's wrap, right? So that was quite interesting, you know, it was very weird. I mean,

 

Adi (02:46.868)

Thanks.

 

Allen (02:48.274)

Adi, you've been to a lot of conferences, I think, in the Beam community, right?

 

Adi (02:52.216)

Yeah, yeah, a few, yeah. I've been to very few non-BEAM conferences. Most of the conferences I've been to are BEAM related. But yeah, I mean, similar experience really for eating lunch, though. Everyone does kind of scramble around, where should we sit and all that. In my experience, people are very... People, like, if they see someone, you know, kind of wandering around,

 

they do call them, hey, come sit with us, let's talk. Luckily, in the first Alexa conference I went to in 2017, the second day of lunch, I got to sit with Jose in the same table. I didn't speak a single word, because I was so nervous, but I just got to hear him speak and kind of absorb all of his energy. But yeah.

 

similar experience in the LESA conference too with the lunch table, first day at school thing.

 

Allen (03:54.446)

I mean, you still know where to sit, right? Because I don't know if you went there with anybody else, but if you go there alone, like you don't know where to sit. Yeah, exactly. Like you don't really know. And obviously, like you said, you know these kind of quote unquote, you know, heroes, right? That, you know, like Jose is probably way up there, of course, because he kind of created everything.

 

Adi (03:59.553)

I was alone, yeah.

 

Adi (04:08.647)

Right.

 

Adi (04:13.188)

Yeah. Yeah, but I think one thing that the last day of the conference, Jose was leaving after, kind of like, he was leaving after he gave his final talk, the last talk of the conference, and he wasn't kind of waiting to hang out. He had to leave somewhere. But I remember I just caught him after his talk, and I was one of the last people in the queue of people waiting to talk to him.

 

we were talking about a few other things in egg toe configurations. And he's like, you know what, there's a couple of people behind you, let them come and talk and we'll just talk for a while. So he stayed half hour longer just to talk and actually just having the opportunity to talk with him. And I was new at that time, I was still a junior engineer in 2017, I guess mid-level, whatever you wanna call it. And yeah, getting an opportunity to talk to literally one of my tier A heroes.

 

It was like pretty, it was pretty epic. And that too, like he himself took time out of his busy schedule. He was gonna leave early and he took time out just to talk to configurations. Those are the time when they were thinking of redoing configurations. And I think I struck a chord with them, but yeah, I was so encouraged and so motivated when I came back from the conference. And I was like, you know what? I'm gonna do better. I'm gonna learn more. I spoke.

 

to all these people. Joseph is just one example. I spoke to all of these amazing people who I know of, I've heard their talks before. And it took me a second to open up, but when I opened up, they were listening to me. That means I must have something at least half decent to say, right? And I think that's a, it's really good way to fight that imposter syndrome, get more confidence and motivation to come and work harder. So yeah.

 

Allen (06:05.838)

Well, that's the nice part. It's basically most people in the community are really open to talk, especially those that you see as they're quote unquote up there. They do want to get a lot of feedback. I'm trying to think if there's ever been a time where like.

 

Adi (06:09.638)

Yeah.

 

Allen (06:21.418)

Maybe they didn't want to hear a free back. I don't know. For me, it seems like they're always open to talking about these kind of things. And I feel like a lot of these kind of people are always like, maybe they don't know how to have what we call chit chat. But if you talk about technology, then they open up because obviously this is what they're really into. Or if you're into woodworking, I think Chris McCord's also into that too. If I remember correctly, that's what he's been doing this for a time.

 

Adi (06:37.372)

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

 

Adi (06:44.964)

I don't know that, nice.

 

Allen (06:47.146)

Yeah, I think you posted a bunch of pictures online quite some time ago. But.

 

Adi (06:52.028)

I don't even do like school. He was at least when I stood in Boston, Alexa meetup and he came to give a talk once about Phoenix again 2017 and 2017 he wasn't do like squatting a lot of that time he had just he was like, I think he I remember if we like joking because he like

 

during the talk and throughout that entire meetup of all the conversations, like there were at least 20 references to squatting. I'm like, dude, like, do you do anything else besides just doing squats? Ha ha ha.

 

Allen (07:24.29)

Obviously squatting the exercise, right? Okay. Yeah, just wanted to make sure I understood. Yeah, okay. Yeah, I guess if you pay attention to their talks, you start to learn more about their hobbies and background, right?

 

Adi (07:26.736)

Yeah, yeah, right, the weightlifting, exactly, yeah. Sorry, that's what I meant.

 

Adi (07:39.036)

Hobbies, right? Right.

 

Allen (07:43.442)

Yeah, I actually I just came back from another conference and now and because I know some of the people there for that conference like some of the people who are involved. I definitely got a lot of the inside jokes that you could see in their demos because you know it's always tricky to come up with these demo code for the slides. And so you read it you're like oh I know who that guy is oh I know that that's his nickname that's why they put that there so it's kind of funny these inside things.

 

Adi (07:57.201)

Right?

 

Adi (08:03.165)

Nice.

 

Allen (08:07.79)

But yeah, I mean, I don't think I've ever had a bad experience trying to talk with somebody at a conference. And I think I don't think anybody was ever what do you call it, like, like in a rush to leave or whatever. So that's another interesting thing that you brought up with Jose.

 

Adi (08:24.628)

Yeah, I think most people in Elixir community are pretty good. I've had a couple bad experiences. I don't want to paint a nicer picture than reality, obviously. So if someone listening, you do approach people. Maybe do a little research on how they interact online. There are some people, it's very obvious based on their interactions, the likelihood that they might be mean to you or something. But yeah, I mean,

 

Jose and, you know, we've had Andrea, you know, these guys are like very nice, unbelievably nice, like so, yeah, they make you feel so respected, heard. Yeah, I don't know, I think Andrea will be there in the score beam, right? So yeah, I'm jealous, Alan, you'll get to meet him. But yeah, I would definitely try to talk to him too. He's, he's a, he's another phenomenal engineer, people can approach and...

 

He'll probably get mad at me for pushing everyone his way, but he loves talking to people and loves talking about engineering, coding, Elixir.

 

Allen (09:33.738)

Yeah, we had him on the show recently, right? I remember who we talked about. Yeah, yeah, OK. Well, then he already knows who I am, so it won't be too creepy when I say hello. I just can imagine, I guess, that they're used to it, you know, like if somebody knew my name or what. Because actually, because I do some other podcasting, right?

 

Adi (09:36.216)

Yeah, yeah, I think like last month or something. Yeah.

 

Allen (09:54.894)

this interesting experience at this last conference I went to that was non-elixir. Where this guy, it was like a movie. He kind of came up to me and he was like, had his hands kind of grouped together and smiling very wide. He's like, I always listen to your podcasts. And I was like, oh, thank you. It was just like very sudden, you know? So I can imagine, yeah, it was, I mean, I try to step back and, and of course, I don't, you know, I just say, okay, you know, we're all.

 

Adi (10:16.851)

Wow.

 

Allen (10:25.368)

can be a little bit awkward sometimes, but I wasn't expecting somebody to recognize me, you know, because usually this is mostly through audio, right?

 

Adi (10:30.276)

Yeah, same here, man, same here. It happened to me. I think a couple of people at my work recognized me through my voice. I thought, oh, I've heard that voice somewhere. Oh, you're Arnie from Elixir Mix. But yeah, I think it's very, because I mean, definitely we are not, you know, we're not like, I mean, I don't wanna speak for you either, Alan, but I mean, we're not like, you know, like Elixir core engineers, or we don't, you know, we're not like, I don't put myself in like anywhere close to those guys.

 

but it feels good that people do listen to us. We have at least contributed in whatever little way we can. I don't want to also speak for you, Alan, but I'm sure you'd be happy to talk to people, listen to the podcast and discuss. You have so much experience, a lot more experience than me in engineering, so I'm sure you can give people career advice and stuff too. So people, hit Alan up.

 

Allen (11:28.402)

Yeah, sadly I didn't prepare stickers though. But yeah.

 

Adi (11:38.397)

We still have time to get that ready.

 

Allen (11:40.903)

I don't know, do we? I mean, I guess I can. China's right next door. I suppose I could get some stickers done. I didn't even think about it. Actually, I think I have some stickers. That's a good point. Maybe I could get some stickers done. People go crazy about stickers, right? Isn't that kind of the big thing about conferences, getting stickers?

 

Adi (11:46.375)

Yeah.

 

Adi (11:54.052)

It is, it is. When I went in 2018, I went with a friend and he had no stickers on his computer when he went to the conference. And when we came back, there was literally no room for a new sticker. So yeah, it is all about stickers.

 

Allen (12:11.542)

But do people's laptops really have like a ton of stickers on them and you can't even see like the original like laptop underneath it or no, because I always see people like that. But I never seen you seen it like a conferences always like that, right? I never seen that in any other place.

 

Adi (12:21.968)

in my experiences.

 

Yeah.

 

Adi (12:29.104)

I mean, I see it more, it could be more cultural too, like many people in the US, I do see, I wouldn't say like 10% of the engineers I work with have a shit-ton of stickers on their laptop. I just like to keep it more clean, so I'm not a big sticker guy, but yeah, it's like also, you know, I can understand, man. You know, you're proud of the fact that you use Alexa, you're proud of the fact that it's growing.

 

you're proud of the fact that you went to a conference where, you know, literally the quality of talks in an Elixir conference, you go to like any other specific language conferences, there's like no comparison. So yeah, you should be proud of using Elixir. And yeah, you should, if sticker is your thing, go for it.

 

Allen (13:14.99)

I mean, is there any general etiquette you think that we should have when we're attending conferences? Because we did want to talk about attending conferences in Elixir or just in general. Like, is there some kind of etiquette we should have when we go there, that you think?

 

Adi (13:28.808)

That's a great question. I think one thing I'd definitely do is obviously before approaching people, read about them a little bit, especially if they're like, they just gave a talk. Just look them up, go to their website. It's always good to know a little bit about them so you don't confuse them with someone else, obviously. That's very embarrassing. I have seen it. I was in a queue waiting to talk to a friend

 

one of those speakers, I'm not going to embarrass him, but the person before me completely confused him with someone else. It was like, yeah, it was really sad. So make sure to do that. Always approach, if you're not talking to them, you know, after like their talk or something, if you're just like approaching them for lunch or if they're just walking, make sure to ask them if they have time, right? Basic etiquettes, right? Hey, do you have a few minutes? Don't just like rush in there with their questions. And people get excited to see some

 

some of their heroes, like Alan said. But it's also important to respect their time, make sure they're actually free and available to speak to. Yeah. And take time. If you go into the conference, if you go to this conference, make a list of people you want to talk to. Make a list of questions and topics you want to talk about. It's always good to have specific things to start things off. It's not that they will not talk to you if you don't have something specific.

 

it's always good to have an ice-breaking question. And off of that, you can branch off and you know, like get, you know, you can get, you can talk about personal things too, but it's good to always talk about something that's like common, that person is comfortable talking about. So yeah, so to conclude, make sure you know about the person, obviously research who or who they are, what they did, have specific questions ready before the conference, if you intend on approaching them. And when you do approach them, ask them if they have a few minutes,

 

I've cleared a CBS etiquette.

 

Allen (15:29.854)

Well, I mean, you're talking about like, know something about these, the people you're going to approach, right? There probably should be some limits about what you do know. You know, maybe public information that's okay, like, okay, this is your address. You know, have you ever seen this guy called Nardwar? You know, this guy?

 

Adi (15:36.466)

Yeah.

 

Adi (15:41.503)

Right.

 

Adi (15:44.946)

Yeah.

 

No.

 

Allen (15:48.966)

Okay, so his name is John Rush, Russ can I just found out his real name, I was just looking him up just to make sure I got the name right. So his name is Nard war, and a RD w U a R. He, he gets these interviews with famous people. And he knows all these crazy random facts about people.

 

And he's like, Hey, do you remember this? And do you know that? And they're like, How do you know about that? And how did you do that? And like, he finds it. I think you'd be it's like, well, sometimes it's creepy, but it's more so like, he doesn't ask them like, Oh, you know, I know which bedroom is, you know, is yours, like, which windows your bedroom, you're like, but

 

Adi (16:14.456)

Oh man, that's creepy.

 

Allen (16:26.71)

He'll say like, he'll be like, Hey, do you, you know, like, here's some gum. And it was like gum that's like no longer produced. But it was like their childhood favorite. And they're like, Whoa, how did you like it's like that kind of thing. And he would be like, Yeah, yeah, I heard

 

that you love this gum. It's your favorite gum when you grew up. And so we actually found some. Maybe you don't want to chew it, but because it's so old, you know, like something like that. But we found this and we heard it's your favorite when you're growing up. And he'd be like, oh, yeah, I remember this. And like, that kind of thing was quite interesting. But no, I think it's good to kind of familiarize yourself with, like you said, who they are, what's their position. And definitely if it's after their talk. Yeah, exactly. And also if it's after their talk,

 

Adi (17:02.896)

Yeah, like the professional contribution.

 

Allen (17:10.656)

happy to talk about that.

 

Adi (17:12.176)

Yeah. Oh, another quick hack. Besides the keynote, morning talks, trust me, I know they start late. They don't start early morning, right? Still, people get up late. Morning talks, you are more likely to find an opportunity to talk to people after the morning talks than late afternoon and evening talks. So yeah, make sure if one of the people you want to talk to is speaking in the morning, all the conference folks try their best to schedule.

 

them to the afternoon talks. But if they're in the morning, hit them up, because people are lazy. Even some of the very good speakers will have only 70% or even 50% of the audience there. And you'll have your opportunity to ask questions even during the talk, especially after the talk. You'll have opportunities to talk with them. So yeah.

 

Allen (18:02.838)

You mean like for them to prepare their topics and everything, right?

 

Adi (18:08.688)

Oh no, I'm sorry. I meant like, you know, if you want to approach someone after their talk, and if they're like, you know, one of the bigger, more popular people, usually there'll be a line of people you have to wait, right? It might even end up with you missing the next talk or whatever. There's less likely for a longer line to be there in a morning talk, because there's less people attending the talk than the afternoon talk or evening talk. Yep. Besides the keynote, obviously.

 

Allen (18:32.158)

Okay. Oh, I don't know about your. Well I'm kind of curious about what is your thought about this but when I went to one conference if I felt like almost every actually when I went to a couple of last conferences, I felt like almost every speaker needed more time to work on their, their PowerPoint or even their code demo. So I'm kind of thinking like maybe it's also good not to approach people before their talk, maybe

 

Adi (18:58.308)

Oh, not before. Yeah, definitely not before. I meant like after. Yeah, for sure after. Yeah, I think before the talk, you'll probably see them practicing and hooking up their computer, like pulling up their code and stuff. I mean, morning talks, again, if it's the first talk of the day, it's also kind of like first real test of the HDMI cords and all the stuff. Like there was a problem with one of my talks where we were having problems with the clicker.

 

But my computer, it was just literally not working. So I had to change the way I was talking. I know it happens quite a bit. So yeah, definitely don't approach anyone before the talk, yeah. Glad you brought that up.

 

Allen (19:40.542)

Yeah, because it's always been my experience. And like, like the last conference I went to, one guy was like, Oh, I found a bug in my code, I got to get this to like, like the guy who's in charge of all the PowerPoints. He's like, running around looking for the guy where I got to get this to him is a big problem. So like, even, yeah, you know, sometimes it's like that, like you have to prepare it like you may not come up there with your own computer, right? You may come up there with, you know, you may be doing you may have to transfer with a USB and everything.

 

Adi (19:48.904)

Haha! Ugh.

 

Adi (19:54.887)

UGH

 

Adi (20:07.442)

Yeah.

 

Allen (20:10.41)

But I mean, how about like lunch period, right? Is that a good time to approach people? Like should you seek people to sit with, or how do you handle that?

 

Adi (20:20.408)

Yeah, definitely see people to sit with. Get there early. And if you find someone, obviously ask them if you can sit. No one will say no. But yeah, it's the best part of conferences is during the lunchtime or right after the day is over, right? So you can actually talk. I mean, the talks themselves are good, but I don't think you're like, at least I've always believed you. You're not going to like...

 

Nothing's going to change your life when you watch the talk live. At the very least, you can watch it later on YouTube and stuff. The really thing about conferences is to get yourself motivated, make yourself feel like you're part of the community, you're part of the conversation. Get yourself excited with the actual talks, but then have conversations outside of the talk with all these people. Learn about how they approach learning.

 

Bruce J will be there, he usually attends the EU one. I don't know. If he's there, I would definitely hit him up. Like he's speaking with him is so motivating. Like definitely hit him up. And whoever is here or whoever is a hero, right? Like just try to try to try to approach them. People are very nice, but obviously make sure you research them. Make sure they're not like known to be rude. There are some people in the community who are, you know, who are rude. So make sure they're not one of them.

 

Allen (21:48.03)

I didn't know there was anybody. I mean, we're allowed to say who it is, or that's something fun on your own.

 

Adi (21:52.305)

I'm not gonna say who it is now, but I have had two specific experiences where it was a, yeah, particularly I was very taken aback by people's rudeness and later I learned that they are, it's something they have a history of and I should have definitely checked before talking to them. So yeah, I mean, if you guys can take it.

 

Allen (22:14.55)

What'd you even check with? How do you even check this kind of stuff? Now you got me curious.

 

Adi (22:18.48)

There's like Reddit and Twitter threads you can check. Other people who know about them told me later, oh yeah, that guy's an a**, you should not have even spoken to him or something like that. So yeah, I'm talking about like serial rude people, like who have a history of being rude, right? So like those, yeah, if you know, you know. Make sure, make sure, there's like few people who are like that.

 

I'm not gonna name them, so yeah.

 

Allen (22:50.57)

I'll be asking you after this. Now you got me curious. I think I know of one person near your area. Okay, I've had interesting experience with him, but I never felt he was rude, but maybe it just didn't happen at that time. Yeah, I think he's got a strong personality.

 

Adi (22:59.124)

I think I know which one you know of and I think yes that person is in that category.

 

Adi (23:13.348)

Yeah, not saying they're always rude, but yeah, it's just a likelihood, right? Yeah.

 

Allen (23:21.386)

I was actually a little bit sad by some of the things he said because he kind of like was saying some not so nice stuff about the things that I thought were good. He was like, oh, that's I think it's kind of crap. And I was like, oh, OK. I felt like a little bit bad because I have a lot of respect for him. But yeah, I mean, I think it's just drawn personality and maybe people think too much. But I don't know. Now I'm really curious who else it could be.

 

Adi (23:29.265)

Mm.

 

Adi (23:43.421)

Yeah.

 

Allen (23:46.55)

I just tried looking up root people on Elixir and didn't see anything. So I'll try some more.

 

Adi (23:51.568)

Maybe we should start a GitHub repo. How's through people? No, I'm kidding.

 

Allen (23:56.894)

No, not even that. I was thinking like, isn't there like a there was a website called the rate my professor calm where you can see if the professors, you know, what kind of professor is so you have some. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, it's still around, I think right my professor. I think there's also ones for doctors and stuff like that. I guess quite useful. That would be interesting to see. I mean, I can imagine a couple interesting posts on there. I think Uncle Bob is definitely on there. If you know who he is.

 

Adi (24:03.856)

Hmm, I'll rate my alchemists nice

 

Adi (24:10.736)

I think it is, yeah. Nice.

 

Allen (24:26.768)

about him.

 

Adi (24:27.652)

Right. And again, just to be clear, the people have different personalities, right? And I'm not saying anyone is particularly bad or something, right? It's just that they have a tendency to be rude. For whatever reason, they might be in Russia or whatever, right? Different people are handling things differently. And you should approach whoever you want to approach. I'm just giving you a heads up that when you do meet someone who you really like, whose work you really like, whose libraries you really use, you know,

 

it could, you know, yeah, just be prepared if they do have a history of being rude. I'm not saying don't approach them. I don't want to isolate anyone or something, right? And no one in the lexicon community is particularly bad as a person, at least that I know of. Yeah.

 

But yeah, most people are really nice, like Abrojo, he's such a sweetheart. He's very nice. Every time I've talked to him, I was very surprised. He actually remembered me from our 2017 interaction the next time I spoke to him two years later. It just shows you that he actually cared. He remembered a Rando Jr. engineer who knew nothing, was talking to him about stuff in a conference two years ago.

 

And he remembered me. It just shows just how nice he is as a person. And the same goes for everyone in the core team, Ecto core team. I think it's part of, I think, the core team requirements, as Andrea said, right? Like, they want to have nice people on. So yeah, anyone in the core team, I'm pretty sure they're really nice. Everyone I've interacted with are just such nice people, very humble people.

 

Allen (26:12.082)

Yeah, I can't think of anybody in the core team or of any of the major projects that have had any bad experiences with.

 

Adi (26:24.504)

Yeah, I mean, there was literally this guy who came from Java. And I remember him in the Boston, like some meetup, kind of being like borderline rude to Chris. And Chris was with a smile, was saying, yeah, I know it's not perfect. He's like, yeah, your router module is terrible. He was like, and Chris was like, yeah, no, I'm so sorry. Like, dude, he's so nice. Like a random guy just is coming and complaining to this guy about an open source.

 

project he built that everyone uses and he's just like humbly saying yeah I'm sorry I'm sorry for the inconvenience for how terrible the ride... I'm like anyway this is just that that's a level of niceness of these folks that I'm talking about everyone's just like really nice.

 

Allen (27:10.83)

So this Java guy came to the meetup and was saying bad things about Phoenix?

 

Adi (27:15.184)

Yeah, to Chris's face.

 

Allen (27:18.634)

I mean, it's always okay to give criticism, but I guess it depends on what he was saying. It sounds like he was saying just straight negative things with no good feedback.

 

Adi (27:24.628)

I think he was just mad. He was just mad, yep.

 

Allen (27:30.382)

I think that sounds kind of familiar, to be honest. This happened in person, like you were there, or what? Or you heard about this? Yeah.

 

Adi (27:35.032)

Yeah, it was in person. Yeah, no, I was there. I was organizing the meetup. Yeah, I was there. This is a story that has been discussed a few times. I'm sure you might've heard of it, yeah. It's a known story.

 

Allen (27:49.774)

Well, I remember like there was some guy in the elixir community who wrote like a lot of Java books and he was complaining about Something in Phoenix like if the documentation is not good or something like I can't remember who Yeah, I remember I remotely remember this person so I used to hang out on the elixir select for a long time and he was like I said, he was known in Java for some reason he was playing around with elixir and I do remember he did have a lot of like complaints and I think that's

 

A little bit of the wrong attitude sometimes. I mean, I think before you have complaints, I think you need to kind of get into the way things are done because every community is gonna be different, right? So until you spend quite a bit of time. Yeah, go ahead.

 

Adi (28:29.864)

Right. Yeah, I mean, it's also, yeah, I think it is a different instance. I don't think this guy wrote books or anything. I think he was just a pain in the person. I think he came from Java and joined an Elixir shop and he was doing Elixir. And his critique was the way Phoenix itself is written, the level of metaprogramming. And I mean, to be fair, I mean, the router module is obviously very hard to wrap your head around. Right. But I mean, it works. It's been working for a while. Everyone uses it.

 

And the guy actually wrote it. You know, it's for free. It's open source. Like you can't go and like yell at the person who wrote this. Chris McCourt can get, he always tries to go to a place where he can work, you know, at least part of his job on Phoenix, right? If he did not, he didn't move that as a requirement, he could get a lot more money. Right. So he is effectively losing money to maintain Phoenix for the community. Right. He wants to give back. So.

 

For a person like that, you can't just be rude and say, hey, your router module is terrible. Come on, man. Build a 10th of Phoenix first. Anyway, I was getting pissed for Chris and Chris completely held his calm. He, with a smile, he literally said, yeah, I'm sorry. It's, yeah, I know it's bad. Like, come on, man. That's just like next level niceness, you know?

 

Allen (29:52.342)

I mean, do you at least have anything valid to say about the router module, why it was bad, or he was just digging on him?

 

Adi (29:58.869)

I mean, it's very heavy in middle program. I think he was talking about specifically how the routes get compiled. It is, like I said, it is very weirdly written in some ways, but hey, you know, it is what it is.

 

Allen (30:14.994)

Yeah, I saw a little bit of, you reminded me of something I saw on Twitter where somebody was saying something about, I kind of want to look it up because it was very interesting.

 

He was saying some not so good stuff about Phoenix and then Chris replied and he was saying oh, yeah, it's kind of hacky You know, this is kind of jank or something and he's like, well, what do you think is better? And the guy didn't really have an answer He was like, yeah, I think this is alright then, you know, like her it could be better But you know, like I don't have any ideas like what do you think something like that?

 

Adi (30:44.72)

Yeah, exactly.

 

Adi (30:54.596)

Yeah, I mean, I have ideas how to make it better, right? But is it needed right now? No, it is not needed. There is so much work to do. And if you rewrite the way router works, even while trying to keep the interface the same, it could have side effects you don't know of right now. It's not worth investing so much time into right now. And even if it is, right, it just being rude about it is the-

 

worst thing to do. Again, I was just giving an example. If Chris is coming to that conference, I'm not sure if he is, don't feel any hesitation towards approaching him. He's a very nice person.

 

Allen (31:43.018)

Yeah, I might do that. I mean, it would be nice to. I mean, they did some really awesome stuff recently with the release of Phoenix 020. So the assigned async. It's funny because we were just doing quite a bit of this in Elixir, sorry, by hand, like basically the stuff that he was talking about.

 

Sorry, I'm not totally focusing because I really want to look up that kind of argument because it's kind of bugging me right now. Well, yeah, there was something. I mean, basically, we were doing what he was talking about. Oh, yeah, sorry. This was what was said. He basically said that this is the most unhinged line of code in your Phoenix project. And he pointed to the verified routes.

 

Allen (32:32.096)

and uh...

 

Allen (32:35.87)

Yeah, he Chris basically just said that's the way it goes when collaborating on literally anything you don't own at least it gives you that luxury. Basically, you can change it if you don't like is what I what he basically said. I don't know what that even means by unhinged line of code. Isaac Yanamoto, I think he's a big person who's in I mean, by big, I mean, like he's big into like

 

Adi (32:44.146)

Yep.

 

Adi (32:50.222)

Who was the person who wrote it?

 

Allen (33:01.398)

I remember correctly who this is. I think he's really big into Zig and Elixir if you know who I'm talking about. Yeah, if you know who I'm talking about, you might.

 

Adi (33:09.786)

I don't.

 

Adi (33:13.511)

Um, okay, well, yeah, I mean...

 

Allen (33:14.146)

What does that word even mean? Unhinged, by the way. I don't understand what the hell that means in that case.

 

Adi (33:19.664)

I don't know, I think people just use that word wrongly. But yeah, and I use the word wrongly wrong just now, but anyway, whatever.

 

Allen (33:24.578)

Yeah.

 

Allen (33:31.03)

Oh, mentally unbalanced or deranged. Well, that's a pretty brutal word to use, then.

 

Adi (33:34.68)

Yeah, but how can a way of writing code be unhinged? The person must be unhinged who wrote it. Anyway, it's just.

 

Allen (33:41.422)

I mean, there is some unhinged code out there that I've seen. But I don't think the use verified routes thing is something that's quote unquote unhinged. But to each their own, that's the nice part about code. It's basically art. Everybody has a different opinion about it.

 

Adi (33:55.856)

Yeah, exactly. Calling something crazy is definitely not worth it. It's too much. It's also the status quo. Phoenix is something that the entire community uses. You're literally saying the vast majority of people who do Elixir are unreasonable by calling something that's adopted by the community so bad. Anyway, I have strong opinions on strong opinions. People should be more flexible.

 

about these things. I was going to actually mention one more thing. For people who are going to this particular conference, type system is huge, right? Read up on Hindley Milner type system, read up on the whole Elixir type updates, and talk to Jose. You might just get a 15-minute conversation. If people have already talked to him, I'm sure he'll be excited to talk about type system if you have ideas.

 

Allen (34:38.234)

Yeah. Yeah, the new.

 

Adi (34:55.488)

stuff so read up on that that's how you prepare if you want to have that long conversation with Jose

 

Allen (35:00.665)

Yeah, I the type system that he presented lexicon is really interesting. I like that they really thought about this a lot and they're like, oh, what about this and what about that? And they came up with some really interesting ideas. And I like that. They're kind of like, all right, this may be dropped.

 

Basically, I feel like they're pretty far along. I don't know how they can drop it. It's definitely possible to be dropped, right? But it's definitely interesting.

 

I've, you know, there's a really interesting talk that was done between Francesco and Robert Verding that was done recently. I don't know if you watched that one yet, but it they go into like the history of the beam and other languages in the beam ecosystem and what everybody's doing and all this kind of stuff. And I think they actually go over why the beam is untyped already. I forgot what it was, but it was quite interesting to hear. It's like, oh, really? Okay. That makes sense.

 

Adi (35:40.66)

Hmm. I do not know.

 

Allen (36:02.872)

I forgot what it was now. But they go over some pretty interesting stuff. That's why I like to listen to these talks by the original people, because you start to get some more history and then you can hear. Oh, so that's why things are like this. Because of that, like you hear the history and you can start to match things up.

 

Adi (36:16.296)

Yeah.

 

Allen (36:23.284)

Um.

 

Coming back to the conference right now, so now that we have, I mean, we had Elixir Conference finished. I think watching those, if you're going to go to CodeBeam, I think watching the Elixir Con videos will get you up to speed with most of the important stuff happening in Elixir at the time so that when you get there, you'll be able to understand what's going on. I also know that at the same time, they're going to be having Rabbit MQ Conference the same day, like the last day of the conference. And yeah, I'm not sure if you can pop over to the other side or not with the same ticket.

 

Adi (36:49.873)

Oh really?

 

Allen (36:54.584)

But you can I'm not too sure but that would be interesting to see because I'm kind of curious about how that's gonna look like Rabbit MQ conference because like rabbit MQ is super popular Is it called the summit? I'm not too sure but

 

Adi (37:03.368)

Yeah, Robin, can you submit?

 

Adi (37:08.364)

Yeah, yeah, I think it's called a summit. I've been to one of them. Oh Topping in Berlin too. I see same

 

Allen (37:13.874)

Yeah, it's like I said, it's just one of the same days. And I think they split the room in half or something. So I would be really interested to see what that even looks like. Because RabbitMQ is something that goes across all communities rather than just beam only. Right? So.

 

Adi (37:16.98)

Wow.

 

Adi (37:22.213)

Yeah.

 

Adi (37:28.32)

Right. I mean, but mostly I think, uh, beam fanatics do end up using rabbit because it's obviously it's like written in overlang. So yeah.

 

Allen (37:34.948)

Yeah.

 

Adi (37:38.953)

Very cool.

 

Allen (37:39.106)

So if you can actually pop over, that'd be interesting to see. And I don't know who else is going to be there. This is some people.

 

Adi (37:44.1)

Yeah, I actually think some of the architectural talks and RabbitMQ conference and last year I attended that was a summit. It was pretty good. So I actually enjoyed the talks. It's obviously lesser talks. It only goes for a day, right? But I thought they were pretty high quality. Actually, it was volunteering and I got a ticket for free. So it was really good.

 

Allen (38:10.39)

Yeah, I'll see if we can hop over to the other side, because that would be interesting to kind of see what that community looks like.

 

Allen (38:18.582)

And I can imagine the talks about how to put everything together would be very interesting to see.

 

Adi (38:23.784)

Yeah.

 

Adi (38:27.216)

Yeah, I would definitely check out. I know VMware, there's a speaker of VMware here. I don't know what particular talk they're giving. I know VMware uses RabbitMQ like crazy. They have, I think their cluster has tens of millions of consumers. So yeah, I would definitely check that out. And CloudMQP obviously is there too. They are...

 

I think the talks look pretty good. Glad you mentioned this, Alan. I had no idea this was happening. Next month.

 

Allen (38:59.126)

Yeah, because I stopped by early in solutions and was talking to some of them over there. And they're obviously heavily involved with the conference. And they let me know. And I was like, oh, I had no idea, to be honest. So it would be interesting to see who's going to go to that kind of event. It'd be cool if we can mix those together if they have some kind of mixer. But I don't know. I didn't hear anything about that part.

 

Adi (39:05.67)

Yeah.

 

Adi (39:09.224)

Nice.

 

Adi (39:18.854)

Yeah.

 

Allen (39:20.334)

there would be some interesting things to discuss with people who are very heavily invested in RabbitMQ and there could be some cross like people getting into the beam because of it, right? And then people who actually use the beam and don't use Rabbit, but maybe like I use Rabbit a lot when I was actually communicating between like systems of different languages. I thought it was pretty easy to send, you know, send messages across that way.

 

Adi (39:29.498)

Yeah.

 

Adi (39:41.02)

Yeah, that's always a great tool. I think it's got some problems with scaling, obviously. But it takes a lot of effort compared to maybe Kafka or something. But yeah, otherwise, I think it's a pretty good solution. Yeah, I think I would also, I was going to check if there's anyone from AWS giving talk. Because I know AWS is a.

 

using Erlang and Elixir heavily for RabbitMQ. Their MQ team is heavily using it, but I don't see any speakers from there. But yeah, anyway, that's great to know that RabbitMQ conference is happening.

 

Allen (40:23.894)

Yeah, I see when somebody from VMware over here said be interesting. JP Morgan, it's also interesting. Bloomberg, MS, Microsoft, it's not interesting to. Well, you know, did you take all the speakers because there's more than just on the first page. I'm not that many more, though. Only one day, so I guess they can't have that many people.

 

Adi (40:27.188)

Thanks.

 

Adi (40:43.192)

Yeah, I would definitely check out the CloudMQP people and the VMware people. They are the ones who use it. Obviously CloudMQP is the craziest one. And so is VMware. But yeah, those two are pretty awesome.

 

Allen (41:01.174)

Yeah, I'll see if I can say hello to these people. Maybe they'll all seem around. I don't know. Yeah. So I'm looking forward to the conference. I need to actually see who's actually going. I'm for sure Jose will be there for sure.

 

Adi (41:20.371)

Yeah.

 

Yeah, I think Jose is there, Andrea is there, Sasha, Eureka is there, Quinn is there. Some really awesome people. All of these are really, really awesome people.

 

Allen (41:32.062)

Randall Thomas, Yacquinn, like you said, Andrea, Sasha. That'd be nice. Sasha's Yurik. And then I think the other Sasha from here might be there. I haven't got confirmation yet.

 

Adi (41:44.188)

Yeah, I've not heard a lot from Mihal Mascala lately, but he looks like he's there too. Nice.

 

Allen (41:51.286)

He's not too far away from there, so he's in Poland, right? So it should be easy for him to get over there.

 

Adi (41:53.128)

Yeah.

 

Adi (41:57.779)

Yeah, some really awesome people.

 

Allen (42:02.638)

Looking forward to it. It would be nice to meet some of these people that don't often cross over the sea, right?

 

Allen (42:13.422)

Yeah, I mean, so we kind of went over some of the etiquette we went over, you know, some of some of the people to talk to some people going over there. I mean, is there anything else we're missing that people should be how to prepare themselves for the event or excuse me or anything else?

 

Adi (42:33.532)

Oh yeah, I guess one thing to keep in mind, I know a lot of talks happen in parallel, right? And you're like, oh, which one you should attend and stuff. Don't worry too much about it because there's this like, HOOVA app that you can download that will keep the talks up on your account for, I think enough time that you can like go back home, go back and watch it. So say there's like talk A and talk B happening the same time you watch talk B, but the talk A's recording will be there for like two days.

 

you can go back and watch in the app. So just letting people know that I was pretty, oh, shoot, this is a tough choice, but it is a tough choice if you want to interact with both speakers, but you can always watch the talks later.

 

Allen (43:21.662)

All right, yeah, and I'm looking forward to seeing all the talks. I don't think I'll get to go to any of the trainings when I mean, Robert birding is one of the trainers that would have been interesting. Same with Francesco. So that would have been fun to see on the take. I mean, yeah, I mean, if we don't have anything else to say, I think we can transition over to picks if you're if you're good to go.

 

Adi (43:38.376)

Yeah.

 

Adi (43:45.116)

Yeah, I'm good.

 

Allen (43:46.89)

Yeah, for me, I've been trying to, I've been looking at this thing for a while, and I've decided to go ahead and bite the bullet. Because I'm doing a little bit of traveling recently, I had an issue where I wanted to...

 

connect to an account and I didn't have another device with me that I needed to connect with I don't know if you ever tried like YouTube is for sure one like if you try to log in with Google and they make you on One of your phones like you know, like press accept that it's you trying to log in and I didn't have that phone with me And so I looked at this thing called YubiKey. Have you ever heard of YubiKey before?

 

Adi (44:25.808)

Yeah, I've been using it for a few years, man.

 

Allen (44:28.438)

Yeah, so I finally bought two of them because it said that you should probably have two. One is a backup. Yeah, that's what I heard. I was planning to buy one, but then I saw Apple requires you to have two, and everybody's like, yeah, you should have a backup, and so I bought two, and I'm looking forward to trying it out. Everybody who I've heard from said that, yeah, Ubiqui is the king, and it's an awesome product, and you've been using it, so it sounds like it's really worth it, right?

 

Adi (44:33.32)

All this too, yep.

 

Adi (44:55.308)

Oh, definitely. Very much worth it. I think there's so many, the whole key algorithm and the key formula, like the both public and private key of UBKey, you can also extract it out of the key, incorporate it, and push it to GitHub. That's another way to back it up. But yeah, there's so many tutorials of doing this now. UBKey is the best way of doing a two-factor authentication. And make sure to get one with the...

 

what is called, like the NFS, right? I forget the name, the NFC, right? And the near field communication, right? Yeah, so you can tap it on a phone too, but yeah.

 

Allen (45:29.265)

NFC? Yeah.

 

Allen (45:36.694)

Yeah, I was I mean, because I'm actually looking to upgrade my iPhone. I actually bought it waiting for it to come in. So I got the 5C and so there's a 5C I where one of where like the other end is lightning. But now that I'm going to get the 15. So I just got the 5C. So it's just a single USB C and I got a new MacBook Pro. That's all USB C. So I thought, OK, it's perfect. And also has NFC on it. So I can do whatever.

 

Adi (45:51.121)

Mmm.

 

Adi (46:00.468)

Nice.

 

Allen (46:02.814)

Yeah, so that's something I'm going to play around with. And I'm still thinking, should I only use it for two factor? Because I saw that you can also use a password list. So I'm like, do I really want to do that? Maybe not, because I don't know what's going to happen. Yeah.

 

Adi (46:13.076)

Get used to it first. Yeah. I use ubiquey as an encryption key as well for certain things. Yeah. Yep, exactly.

 

Allen (46:21.61)

Yeah, I saw it works with OpenPGP and you could sign your commits and everything else. It's like, all right. So that's why I'm also thinking this could be useful for work stuff also.

 

Adi (46:34.172)

Yeah, great pick. I guess a terrible conference and stuff. And I think I've already had this pick before, but a reminder, SpawnFest happening a week after, I think, these conferences. So the registration is still on. So if you guys wanna hack over the weekend of 28th and 29th of October, sign up.

 

sign up. Like I said, there's so many prices and stuff, the likelihood is if you do something half decent, you'll probably end up winning something. And also, if you have friends and stuff you're in a code with, it's a great opportunity to do that while also winning something.

 

Allen (47:20.074)

Okay, and this one, you don't have to go anywhere, right? It's all online. Wasn't SpawnFest where they have like a Lixir desktop come out of?

 

Adi (47:23.156)

It's all online, yeah.

 

Adi (47:31.532)

Oh yeah, I think they have, I don't know if it's a desktop necessarily, but yeah, they have, they've had a lot of mech, I guess one library, the mocking library, right? It came out of spawn first 2020, 2019, but yeah, they have had a lot of libraries come out of that.

 

Allen (47:48.298)

Yeah, I could say there's definitely some interesting stuff that comes out of it. So that's pretty cool. Like what kinds of prizes are they are they actually going to be handing out? It's like we got annual subscriptions to grox.io. Codebeam America

 

Adi (47:58.076)

We got Amazon gift card. Last two times I participated, I won something, both the times and it was Amazon gift card. So yeah, that's the best price, right?

 

Allen (48:12.982)

I suppose so. It's $750 in Amazon gift card, so it must not be a huge amount you get in Amazon, I think.

 

Adi (48:22.832)

Yeah, I mean, if you split amongst three people and if you win multiple, because there's multiple categories, right? If you win multiple, it can add up. So yeah, it's just me and my wife participating this time. So we'll hopefully we'll win something.

 

Allen (48:29.168)

Yeah. Okay.

 

Allen (48:37.514)

Going on vacation on that or what?

 

Adi (48:40.068)

No, just hang out. She has done Elixir in a bit. She transitioned to engineering a little over two years ago. And I helped her with some Elixir, and she was learning very quickly. But then she got a Ruby job, and it's hard to learn outside of job. So she wants to get back into Elixir. I'm like, let's do a spawn fest together. So yeah.

 

Allen (49:03.214)

That's that's romantic You gotta be you gotta be you gotta be careful though, right? I don't know what kind of team teammates she is, but you know That's always it's always tricky to find a good teammate

 

Adi (49:05.48)

HAHAHAHA

 

Adi (49:11.952)

Ah, she's...

 

Adi (49:15.512)

She's a, yeah, we are pretty much in sync with how we do things. We work really well as a team. Luckily.

 

Allen (49:26.21)

You're not just going to submit your own framework, right?

 

Adi (49:31.205)

My own framework.

 

Allen (49:33.39)

I mean, you wrote the book on it, didn't you not?

 

Adi (49:35.144)

Oh, no. Yeah, not that. But it should be something that we work from scratch, right? Otherwise, that should be fair. We should start from zero. And something that also my wife is interested in. So we'll probably just build a Phoenix app, keep it simple. Yeah. Because if it's complex, I don't want to be the only one coding and her to not enjoy. That defeats the point.

 

Allen (50:07.951)

All right. Well, it was good to have you on. It's interesting to talk about how conferences are, because not everybody gets to go. Kind of interesting. And if it's your first time, it'd be good to hear about what the experience is like. And I think we got that out to the listeners. That's the most important part.

 

Adi (50:15.228)

Yeah.

 

Adi (50:24.904)

For sure, yeah, please, please everyone attend conferences. It's the best part is when you come back, you feel so motivated. So yeah.

 

Allen (50:33.166)

And again, I'll be at code beam. Now that you remind me, I'll try to get some stickers. Maybe I'll get them in time to pass them out if you're curious. And with that, see you guys next time. Bye.