The Controlled Magic of Oban with Parker and Shannon Selbert

While there is magic to be found in many frameworks, having too much going on under the hood without you being able to control it is not for everybody. Today we invite Parker and Shannon Selbert to speak about their dynamic partnership and the ‘controlled magic’ of their tool Oban. Together Parker and Shannon founded Soren, where they help clients with established web apps stabilize, scale, and ‘add schmancy features’. Their tool Oban is a persistent background job processor written in Elixir whose differentiating feature revolves around keeping jobs after they're processed. We dive right in with Parker and Shannon hearing about how they got into programming before they talk about Oban and what sets it apart. Next up we get into how our guests navigate their personal relationship and professional partnership and they weigh in on homeschooling kids, writing new features, and the necessary life skills for handling Oban user support. Moving onto the topic of the BEAM, we explore the unique type of magic it offers and how this plays into some of the cooler features of Oban such as being able to cancel jobs. Our guests talk about some of the kinks they still need to work out of their tool and we wrap up our conversation on the pro version of Oban and how successful it has been. As always we close today’s show off with our mini-interview, this time with Joe Peck from Spreedly!

Key Points From This Episode:

• The illicit stories behind how Parker and Shannon got into tech.
• Understanding Oban, a persistent background job processor written in Elixir.
• How Oban is different from other job processors like Sidekiq.
• The great partnership our guests have and the story behind Soren.
• How Parker and Shannon differentiate their personal and professional life.
• The approach Parker and Shannon take to handling Oban user support.
• Perspectives on the magic of homeschooling, relationships, and Oban!
• Different kinds of magic provided by different frameworks and why Elixir magic is the best.
• How Parker and Shannon got interested in Erlang, BEAM, and Elixir.
• The best part about maintaining an open-source project.
• The story behind getting a global concurrency lock on handling batches.
• Added features that come with upgrading to the pro version of Oban.
• Canceling a job on Oban and the role the BEAM plays in allowing this.
• Writing documentation for Oban and our guest’s plans to make video tutorials.
• The shift in digital learning more towards video tutorials.
• Perspectives on whether we have arrived at a golden age in computing yet.
• Challenges around implementing seamless horizontal scaling in Oban.
• Making a living and working on Oban; advantages of setting up a pro version.
• Our mini-interview with Joe Peck where we explore his journey with Elixir.

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

Elixir Wizards |> Conference — https://smr.tl/conf-podcast
SmartLogic — https://smartlogic.io/
Soren on Twitter — https://twitter.com/sorentwo?lang=en
Soren — https://sorentwo.com/
Parker Selbert on GitHub — https://github.com/sorentwo
Shannon Selbert on GitHub — https://github.com/sorenone
Oban — https://github.com/sorentwo/oban
Sidekiq — https://sidekiq.org/
Lawnmower Man — https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104692/
Soren Kierkegaard — https://www.britannica.com/biography/Soren-Kierkegaard
Ender's Game — https://www.amazon.com/Enders-Ender-Quintet-Orson-Scott/dp/0812550706
Joe Peck — https://peckyeah.com/
Spreedly — https://www.spreedly.com/

Special Guests: Parker Selbert and Shannon Selbert.