Catalina Astengo on The Many Languages of Nav

Joining us today on Elixir Wizards is Catalina Astengo, Staff Software Engineer at Nav Inc. We chat with Catalina about how she went from working as a process engineer in a mine to a software engineer in beautiful Salt Lake City.

In today’s show we find out more about Catalina’s professional background, how and why she started taking Ruby courses while working at a mine in southern Utah, how she fell in love with Salt Lake City and what it looked like transitioning to a new profession. We learn about the ins & outs of Nav and their team roles, as well as how they keep up with all of the languages that they are using including Elixir, Ruby, Go and JS. Tune in today to learn more from today’s special guest, Catalina Astengo!

Key Points From This Episode:

A brief breakdown of today’s topic and introduction to our special guest, Catalina Astengo.
What it was like working in a small town in a mine in southern Utah
What a process engineer is and what the job title entails
What prompted the switch from process engineering to software engineering
What Nav does as a company
Catalina gives us a rundown of her professional career.
Is this the most Polyglot stack we have encountered this season!?
The ins & outs at Nav and their teams roles
How Nav uses Elixir on a daily basis
How Nav keeps up to date on all of the languages they are using
Concerns about using multiple languages on the backend
Context switching between languages
How Nav decided to use Golang and why she prefers Elixir
Where Nav is based and where they are hiring
How Catalina and her team made a home movie production of Beetlejuice
We review Elixir Conf 2020 and takeaways that Catalina had from the conference
How Nav uses GRPC
RP vs GRPC - what’s the difference?
Protobuf for validation schemes across GPS
Ways to validate event payloads by using the Graph QL
We discuss our experience with management vs. coding
Owens penguin discovery about Catalina on the Nav website

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

Catalina Astengo on Twitter — https://twitter.com/catalinaastengo
Catalina Astengo on GitHub — https://github.com/castengo
Catalina Astengo on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/catalinaastengo/
Blog Post on Graph QL Schema Validation – https://www.infoq.com/news/2022/05/graphql-schema-validation/
Nav Careers — https://www.nav.com/
SmartLogic — https://smartlogic.io/
SmartLogic on Twitter — https://twitter.com/smartlogic
SmartLogic on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/company/smartlogic-io/
SmartLogic on Facebook — https://www.facebook.com/smartlogic/
Sundi Myint on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/sundimyint/