Programming in Elixir and Phoenix to build a proof-of-concept product during our hackathon

In their first episode, Starr, Josh and Ben talk about the company hack-week where they built a small proof-of-concept product with Elixir and Phoenix.

Full Transcript:
Josh:               Okay so you guys tell me if this too stupid but

Starr:              Well if you have to ask

Ben:                I like how this is starting.

Starr:              Sold.

Announcer:          They're just three amigos making their way in the crazy old world of software as service. Welcome to Founder Quest.

Starr:              Yeah so ah lets talk about the hackathon guys.

Josh:               Cool.

Ben:                Okay.

Starr:              So last week we had our first ever honey badger hackathon and the idea was that we would take a break from working on our from our mundane lives you know working on air tracking, up time tracking stuff like that and work on something completely different to kind of clear out the cobwebs and have a little fun. Yeah we chose to build a product in Elixir and Phoenix because we don't really um use those two often so it's a nice chance to do something different.

Starr:              So what do we hope to achieve by doing this? Like what was the goals?

Josh:               So I think like just I mean mainly have fun um one of the things I really liked about the hackathon was we also this was the first thing we did coming back from a three week vacation for Christmas over which I think we all worked on an Elixir Udemy course, so it was a chance to practice some of the stuff we learned in the course and get back into the swing of things.

Starr:              Yeah that was nice. Are we gonna do that vacation all the time? Is that going to be a regular thing?

Josh:               Yeah I think so. Will break it up by hackathons but otherwise I'm good with just being on vacation.

Starr:              Okay can we have a hackathon driven company? Is that a thing?

Josh:               Yeah I think so.

Josh:               Would we be like hip then, would we be popular?

Starr:              Probably. What do you think Ben?

Ben:                Can we be more popular? I mean you know. There are limits right?

Josh:               Yeah Ben always brings humbleness.

Starr:              Don't want to fly too close to the sun.

Starr:              Let's think back to so we first were talking about the hackathon at one of our conclaves. If you don't know us we work remotely, we do everything in Slack and stuff. We meet up once a quarter for what we call conclaves at an undisclosed location in western Washington.

Starr:              So we went through lots of different ideas for the hackathon.

Josh:               Who was it that came up with the idea we went with?

Starr:              I think it might have been Ben. We're talking about like the model of deploying the applications that we're interested in building and I think we were talking about things that are easy to do onsite or on a single server, they're like a self hosted type thing and that's what kind of led us to talking about Elixir and stuff, but I think it was Ben that came up with the

Ben:                I think you know we do a lot in our day jobs with high traffic sites. We do a lot of processing and one thing that was really interesting was as far as Elixir is concerned is that the high concurrency that it can support so we're like “oh what can we build that would be interesting that would be in our wheelhouse but still kind of fun” and we did that. Like you said we did Elixir over the Christmas break but we also did the advent of code and

Starr:              Oh yeah the, I didn't finish that.

Josh:               Yeah.

Ben:                I didn't finish it either .

Josh:               I did like one tenth of what I expected.

Starr:              I did like two.

Ben:                But we don't have to talk about that. But we started with the right intentions. I know that for me, I was like doing them first in Ruby and then I would do an Elixir and see how different it was. Having the idea to play with that was a lot of the fun motivation behind the hackathon.

Josh:               Yeah so eventually I think Ben was like “lets build a segment replacement”, because we use segment to send various,

Starr:              Well Segment is sort of works like a repeater, you send events that happen to your users, you send your user data to Segment and then it sends out to your vast array of third party services that consume that data like Intercom, like I think we use Mix Panel, we use Drip. Maybe Google analytics, I don't know.

Ben:                Yeah.

Josh:               Yeah. Like it costs a lot of money, right?

Starr:              Yeah it costs a lot of money well, a fair amount of money. It depends

Josh:               Yeah right.

Starr:              We basically only use it to broadcast, request to other services.

Josh:               Right.

Starr:              So it seems like it should be pretty cheap but its not pretty cheap.

Starr:              Yeah and we've had some trouble. We've been, we've talked about building some sort of internal thing to do this for us, just because we're not fully utilizing its full capability yet either. I think the core of what it is like a centralized customer information database and warehouse really. And then it handles, like you said sending all those events to all the different places like third party software and service tools, even to the point where it can even replay events which I think is a cool feature that we're not using at all.

Josh:               So is it actually a database though? Can you go in and query your users straight into Segment?

Ben:                Well one of the destinations that you can configure is like a [inaudible] database, which we do, we dump [inaudible] so you can go and query the events. I think one of things that was interesting about using that at the hackathon project was that its very similar to what we do, we take in a bunch of events, and we spit them out to different places like Slack or Github issues, or whatever so we thought...