The Right Amount of Magic with Erik Person

Elixir Wizards

Today we are joined by the Vice President of Engineering at Corvus Insurance, Erik Person! Erik continues our journey into the magic of the BEAM, our season-long theme for the Elixir Wizards Podcast, and we get to hear all about Erik's path in programming, his relationship with Elixir, and his utilization of the BEAM. Growing up in a family involved in computer science, and an early affinity for technology made the choice of what to study at college a straightforward one for Erik. He tells us about his life during and after those school years, touching on his first job and the important milestones leading up to his current position at Corvus. We talk about his early feelings for Elixir and why it appealed to him almost immediately before discussing different languages on the BEAM and his love of types! Our guest also shares some of the bigger challenges he has encountered working in Elixir and touches on the issue of scaling effectively. In this episode, we also air a mini-feature with SmartLogic's very own Stephanie Vizzi, talking about her work at the company, relationship with Elixir, and more! So for all this, plus a lot in between, be sure to tune in!

Key Points From This Episode:

• Erik's family ties to computer science and his path leading into programming.
• The first job that Erik landed in programming and his current role at Corvus Insurance.
• The BEAM at Corvus and the general architecture of the company's technology.
• Erik's first encounters and learnings with Elixir and the questions it answered for him immediately.
• The learning curve for languages on The BEAM; Erik's own journey to understanding.
• Erik's preference for types and his wish for their inclusion on Elixir!
• Lisp on The BEAM; Erik unpacks his perspectives and the blog post he wrote on the subject.
• Getting to grips with abstract forms and how these terms operate in Erlang and Elixir.
• The challenges that Erik experienced parsing and manipulating the code in Elixir.
  
• Erik weighs in on BEAM magic; appreciating the magic that is possible with Elixir and Elm.
• Perspectives on scaling on Elm and Elixir as an application grows rapidly.
• How Erik and his team typically use contexts and service-oriented architecture.
• Challenges with compile times during the process of scaling of the application.
• Excitement about the progressive steps in the data science component of Corvus.
• How Erik applied his skills to his passion for playing blackjack by creating a card-counting application.
• The remote meeting hardware device that Erik built as a pandemic side-project!
• This week's community mini-feature! Looking at how Stephanie Vizzi got into and uses Elixir.

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

SmartLogic — https://smartlogic.io/
Erik Person on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/erik-person-a9368bb
VirtualBox — https://www.virtualbox.org/
Tunnelblick — https://tunnelblick.net/
Corvus Insurance — https://www.corvusinsurance.com/
Corvus Job Openings — https://boards.greenhouse.io/corvusinsurance/
Clojure — https://clojure.org/
Saša Jurić — https://github.com/sasa1977
LFE — https://lfe.io/
Elm — https://elm-lang.org/
Robert Virding — https://codesync.global/speaker/robert-virding/
The Erlang Rationale — https://elixirforum.com/t/the-erlang-rationale-by-robert-virding-pdf/35313
Paul Graham — http://www.paulgraham.com/
Hackers and Painters — https://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Painters-Big-Ideas-Computer/dp/1449389554
Myers Briggs — https://www.myersbriggs.org/my-mbti-personality-type/mbti-basics/
Chris McCord — http://chrismccord.com/
Mix Xref — https://hexdocs.pm/mix/Mix.Tasks.Xref.html
Gleam — https://gleam.run/
Leex — http://erlang.org/doc/man/leex.html
GNU Bison - The Yacc-compatible Parser Generator — https://www.gnu.org/software/bison/manual/
YACC — https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/introduction-to-yacc/
Stephanie Vizzi on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephanie-vizzi-b1158996

Special Guests: Erik Person and Stephanie Vizzi.