In this conversation, Ben and Derrick discuss the challenges of growing a business and the decision to target specific market segments. They explore the trade-offs between serving a broad audience and focusing on a niche market. They also discuss the technical choices and architectural decisions in building a product, with Derrick sharing his positive experience with Elixir and the Phoenix framework.

Links

• Tuple.app (https://tuple.app) - The best app for pair programming
• SavvyCal.com (https://savvycal.com) - The scheduling tool Derrick created
• Phoenix (https://www.phoenixframework.org) - the Elixir framework SavvyCal is built on
• Rails (https://rubyonrails.org) - the Ruby framework Ben worked with

Key Takeaways

• Elixir and the Phoenix framework offer a maintainable and explicit approach to building applications.
• Functional programming paradigms can simplify code organization and improve maintainability. Object-oriented programming and functional programming have different approaches to code organization and maintainability.
• The active record pattern in Rails can lead to large and complex models, while the repository pattern in Phoenix provides a more modular and explicit approach.
• Open source contributions can be seen as a good faith contribution to the commons and can provide benefits such as status and marketing opportunities.
• Developers can improve their design skills by studying resources like the book 'Refactoring UI' and being introspective about user interfaces in their daily lives.

Chapters

• (00:00) - Introduction and Background
• (02:12) - Savvy Cal and Horizontal Products
• (05:56) - Choosing Between Niche and Broad Audience
• (15:59) - Phoenix vs. Rails
• (22:20) - Object Oriented vs. Functional Programming
• (36:02) - The Motivations Behind Open Source Contributions
• (43:20) - Improving Design Skills as a Technical Person