Elixir Wizards
SmartLogic LLC
Elixir Wizards is an interview-style podcast from SmartLogic featuring conversations with developers, engineers, and industry leaders about the Elixir programming language and the broader software development landscape. Each episode explores how modern systems are built, from distributed architectures and infrastructure to developer workflows, security, and emerging technologies like AI. While rooted in the Elixir ecosystem, the show often branches out to compare approaches across languages, platforms, and disciplines. Whether you’re working in Elixir or just interested in how software is evolving, Elixir Wizards offers practical insights and thoughtful perspectives from the people building today’s systems.
Episodes
Mentioned books
29 snips
Jul 23, 2026 • 1h 5min
What Changed and What Remains True with James Gray
James Gray, co-author of Designing Elixir Systems with OTP and Elixir/OTP educator working in FinTech. He talks about durable system design, layered architecture, supervision trees, and why boundaries still matter. He explores how AI reshapes learning and workflows, warns about model-driven drift and risks, and shares real-world stories of using LLMs in development.
23 snips
Jul 16, 2026 • 1h
Owning Your AI Stack with Zach Daniel
Zach Daniel, creator of the Ash Framework and Igniter and VP of Engineering at Remedy Meds, discusses owning the AI stack and building agentic workflows. He talks about combining deterministic tools with LLMs, protecting organizational knowledge in Git, training junior developers in an AI-augmented world, guardrails for agent-created docs, and why Elixir and the BEAM suit safer agentic systems.
13 snips
Jul 9, 2026 • 50min
What Should Software Remember? with Flora Petterson
Flora Petterson, a self-taught Elixir developer, speaker, and maker known for Nerves and animatronics. She explores what it means for software to forget and how systems can be designed to recover. Conversations cover GenServer lifecycle, supervision limits, deciding when to recover or abandon state, documentation as team memory, and how creative hardware projects shape learning.
23 snips
Jul 2, 2026 • 56min
The State of Career Growth in Elixir with Bruce Tate
Bruce Tate, founder of Groxio and longtime Elixir educator and author, discusses mentorship, Elixir’s evolution, and the effects of AI on developer careers. He explains “anti-vibe coding” and argues training—not blame—must improve. Topics include OTP and architectural literacy, managing AI-generated code, reinvesting AI productivity into mentoring, and skills that now distinguish engineers.
16 snips
Jun 25, 2026 • 1h 5min
The State of the Open Internet with Mallory Knodel
Mallory Knodel, founder of the Social Web Foundation and public interest technologist, explains how internet standards and governance shaped a centralized social web. She explores ActivityPub and the Fediverse, the real costs of platform dominance for small providers, data portability and identity challenges, and how AI agents, discoverability, and governance mix with privacy and usability concerns.
16 snips
Jun 18, 2026 • 54min
The State of the Power Grid with Mike Ratliff
Mike Ratliff, co-founder and CTO of GridVar and 30-year veteran building software for utilities, talks about the changing power grid. He covers building software that meets hardware constraints and utility risk aversion. He discusses grid interconnection, power quality, distributed energy, microgrids, virtual power plants, and why Elixir suits always-on energy systems.
11 snips
Jun 11, 2026 • 1h 1min
Curiosity, Courage, and the Human Side of Software with Ellyse Cedeno
Ellyse Cedeno, founder of Heuristic Salvo and a 25+ year software leader, shares winding tales from Netscape to medical research and Elixir. She talks about staying curious, embracing a beginner’s mindset, building Elixir game servers and hardware demos, balancing passion projects with work, and using soft influence and judgment to shape tech decisions as AI changes developer roles.
9 snips
Jun 4, 2026 • 42min
The Missing GitHub Status Page with Marek Šuppa
Marek Šuppa, principal ML engineer and creator of the Missing GitHub Status Page, rebuilt historical GitHub uptime from archived data. He talks about why he made the tracker and how it exposes gaps between reported and experienced reliability. Short conversations cover GitHub's shift into critical infrastructure, alternatives and self‑hosting tradeoffs, and how AI and platform growth affect fragility and developer dependence.
26 snips
May 28, 2026 • 56min
The State of Code Quality with Saša Jurić
Saša Jurić, Elixir mentor and author of Elixir in Action, focuses on maintainable Elixir codebases and software craftsmanship. He explores why code must be clear communication, not just correct. Topics include the theater of pull requests, using AI as a careful collaborator, making tiny testable commits, and keeping human judgment central to avoid fast-moving technical debt.
10 snips
May 21, 2026 • 46min
Cloud Fragility & Distributed Systems with Somtochi Onyekwere
Somtochi Onyekwere, a Fly.io engineer and Corrosion contributor focused on distributed systems and replication. He explores cloud fragility and why centralization is risky. He discusses multi-region deployments, replication trade-offs like eventual consistency versus strict consistency, CRDTs and conflict resolution, testing failovers and rollbacks, and ways to reduce blast radius while running apps closer to users.
