AJ (Alykhan Jetha), CEO and CTO of Marketcircle, joins the Elixir Wizards to share his experience building and evolving Daylite, their award-winning CRM and business productivity app for Apple users. He details his experiences as a self-taught programmer and how Marketcircle has navigated pivots, challenges, and opportunities since its founding in 1999.

AJ explains why they migrated Daylite’s backend to Elixir, focusing on their sync engine, which demands high concurrency and fault tolerance. He highlights how Elixir has improved performance, reduced cloud costs, and simplified development with its approachable syntax and productive workflows.

The conversation also touches on the technical hurdles of deploying native apps for Apple devices and the potential for integrating new technologies like LiveView Native to streamline cross-platform development.

For technical founders, AJ emphasizes the importance of leveraging your strengths (“superpowers”), staying deeply connected to the development process, and finding stability in tools like Elixir amidst a rapidly evolving tech ecosystem. He also shares Marketcircle’s roadmap for migrating more customers to Elixir-powered systems and explores the potential for new features in their native apps.

Tune in for insights on building resilient systems, navigating technical and business challenges, and how Elixir is shaping Marketcircle’s future.

Topics discussed in this episode:

AJ’s journey as a self-taught programmer and entrepreneur
Marketcircle’s evolution since 1999 and lessons from their pivots
Daylite’s growth as a flagship product for Apple users
Migrating to Elixir for high concurrency and fault tolerance
How Elixir improved performance and reduced cloud costs
The simplicity of Elixir and its impact on developer onboarding
Challenges in managing a growing microservices architecture
Insights into deploying native apps for the Apple ecosystem
Exploring LiveView Native for future cross-platform development
Advice for technical founders: leveraging your superpowers
Staying connected to development to maintain system understanding
The role of Elixir in improving development efficiency and stability
Planning gradual customer migrations to an Elixir-powered backend
Potential new features for Daylite’s native apps
Benefits of collaboration with the Elixir community
#ElixirMullet -- native app in the front, Elixir in the back
Navigating a rapidly evolving tech ecosystem as a founder
Leveraging Elixir to future-proof Marketcircle’s systems
Balancing technical and business priorities in a startup environment
AJ’s thoughts on the future of Elixir in powering business tools

Links mentioned:

https://www.marketcircle.com/
Daylite.app
https://www.nextcomputers.org/
https://www.digitalocean.com/
Python Async https://docs.python.org/3/library/asyncio.html
https://github.com/sinatra/sinatra
https://github.com/dependabot
https://kafka.apache.org/
https://www.djangoproject.com/
https://github.com/socketry/falcon
https://github.com/puma/puma
https://www.swift.org/blog/announcing-swift-6/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Async/await
https://www.ffmpeg.org/
https://www.sqlite.org/
https://github.com/commanded/commanded
https://pragprog.com/titles/khpes/real-world-event-sourcing/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
https://reactnative.dev/
https://www.electronjs.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebOS
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alykhanjetha/
https://bsky.app/profile/ajetha.bsky.social

Special Guest: Alykhan Jetha.

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