Welcome back to the SmartLogic Podcast where we talk about the latest developments and best practices in the web and mobile software industry. In continuing with our theme of Elixir Internals, we’re having a conversation about the inner workings of one of the most popular Elixir libraries, Credo, and we are joined by the author René Föhring.

René shares the story of how he was introduced to Elixir while doing his PhD and looking for a new programming language and then shares the philosophy and inspiration Credo was developed on. Wanting Credo to be a less rule-based, authoritative code analysis tool and more user friendly, René focused on creating it to act as a type of digital mentor to the many developers out there who do not have a human mentor. He also shares about some of the launching hiccups, what he would have done differently had he been given another opportunity and some of the most important lessons that he has learned working in the open source community. Be sure to join us for all the inside info!

Key Points from This Episode:

• More about René’s job as head of product development at 5 Minds and what they do.
• What he does in his free time: open source maintenance and conference speaking.
• How he got started with Elixir and wanting to learn a new programming language.
• What Credo is all about, why you’d want to use it and what makes it different.
  
• The inspiration behind writing Credo and wanting a more positive, less dogmatic tool.
  
• Starting off building on Dogma but then pivoting and going in an independent direction.
• The hiccups René experienced when first releasing Credo and what he’d do differently.
• The different checks in Credo and how they function and respond to issues.
• How Elixir 1.6 impacted the development of Credo.
  
• What’s new with the Credo 1.1 release?
• René’s experience working with open source and the first library he contributed to.
  
• Important lessons he has learned by being part of the open source community.
• And much more!

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

Elixir — https://elixir-lang.org/
Credo — http://credo-ci.org/
René Föhring on Twitter — https://twitter.com/rrrene?lang=en
5 Minds IT – Solutions — https://www.5minds.de/
GitHub — https://github.com/
Ruby — https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/
Go — https://golang.org/
Cplusplus — http://www.cplusplus.com/
StyleCop — https://github.com/StyleCop/StyleCop
Dogma — https://github.com/lpil/dogma
Hex — https://hex.pm/

Learn more about how SmartLogic uses Phoenix and Elixir.

Special Guest: René Föhring.