Chris McCord with a Deep Dive on Phoenix

Although it’s taken him four seasons to make an appearance, we are so glad to finally welcome Chris McCord, creator of the Phoenix framework, onto the show. While this season’s focus is on system and application architecture, today’s discussion deviates to focus on Phoenix. We get started by hearing more about Chris’s programming journey, all the way from TI-Basic to where he is now. After this, we dive into LiveView, the project Chris is currently focusing most of his energy on. We get into some of the incredible changes that have been made including live navigation, deep change tracking optimizations, and static asset tracking. Chris shares which of the changes he is most excited about, along with why he enjoys seeing LiveView being misused. We then look at some of the critiques of LiveView and Phoenix generally. Chris offers counter-arguments to the most common criticisms of the framework. He shares how the title of 'framework' can be a double-edged sword, as well as why he is hesitant to extract channels prematurely. We wrap the show up with a look into the future, hearing more about what’s on the horizon for Phoenix and where Chris hopes the Elixir community is headed. This conversation was well worth the four season-long wait, so be sure to tune in today!

Key Points From This Episode:

• Why it took Chris four whole seasons to finally make an appearance on the show.
• Chris’s programming journey from T-Basic all the way to Java, HTML, and PHP.
• How a broken back landed Chris his first paid programming job.
• Learn more about Chris’s current project, LiveView, and some of the recent additions.
• Why the optimizations were the most interesting changes for Chris to make on LiveView.
• Some of the most interesting use cases Chris has seen of LiveView.
• How Chris plans to navigate laying LiveView out on a larger codebase.
• Chris’s take on stateful applications and why the platform is so important.
• The origins of the hilariously termed ‘dead view.’
• Some of the most pertinent critiques of LiveView and Phoenix generally.
• Chris busts some of the invalid critiques of Phoenix.
• Why the community feedback on LiveWire has been so surprising to Chris.
• Phoenix 1.6 changes and when we can expect its release.
• Chris’s take on whether Elixir is likely to overthrow Rails in terms of popularity.
• The systemic blockers that create adoption friction of Elixir and Phoenix.
• Looking into the future — Chris’s goals for Phoenix and his hopes for the Elixir community.

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

Chris McCord — http://chrismccord.com/
Chris McCord on Twitter — https://twitter.com/chris_mccord
DockYard — https://dockyard.com/
Dave’s Site — https://www.davesite.com/
Hacking with PHP — http://www.hackingwithphp.com/
Phoenix LiveView — https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix_live_view/Phoenix.LiveView.html
Phoenix Phrenzy — https://groundstation.gigalixirapp.com/
Dashbit: An Upcoming Authentication Solution for Phoenix — https://dashbit.co/blog/a-new-authentication-solution-for-phoenix
Aaron Renner on GitHub — https://github.com/aaronrenner/phx_gen_auth
Phoenix Issues on GitHub —
https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix/issuesq=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+milestone%3Av2.0
Phoenix Fire Nest — https://github.com/phoenixframework/firenest
Phoenix Pub/Sub — https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix_pubsub
ElixirConf 2020— https://2020.elixirconf.com/
ElixirConf 2020 Speaker Proposals — https://2020.elixirconf.com/#cfp
TI-83 Calculator — https://www.amazon.com/Texas-Instruments-TI-83-Graphing-Calculator/dp/B00001N2QU
Teach Yourself C in 21 Days — https://www.amazon.com/Teach-Yourself-21-Days-Sams/dp/0672310694
Rest Fest — https://www.restfest.org/
José Valim on Twitter — https://twitter.com/josevalim
Jason Goldberger on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-goldberger-84237392/
SmartLogic — https://smartlogic.io/
SmartLogic Jobs — https://smartlogic.workable.com/

Special Guest: Chris McCord.