Practical Elixir from the BEAM workshop.
Elixir Mix brings developers into detailed conversations about Elixir and its surrounding ecosystem. Episodes move from library internals and distributed systems to hardware experiments, language tradeoffs, and production adoption.
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Elixir Mix is a developer discussion show about Elixir, Erlang, Phoenix, Nerves, OTP, and the wider BEAM world. Its center of gravity is practical engineering. Guests describe what they are building, what constraints shaped the work, and how Elixir behaves when it meets real systems. A Domo episode gets into runtime type validation, generated source files, structs, Ecto schemas, and the trust problem around code generation. The discussion does not stop at the library pitch. It asks what gets compiled, whether the generated code is readable, and how a developer can inspect what happened. A Python interoperability episode frames Elixir as a strong home base that can still call out to better-suited tools when image recognition or machine learning enters the picture. The panel talks about adoption honestly: teams may choose Elixir for concurrency, fault tolerance, and design, while still needing a path to Python, Rust, or other runtimes later. Distributed systems get similar treatment. Riak Core and Partisan become a way to talk about peer nodes, hash spaces, key ownership, pub-sub systems, brokers, chat rooms, and scaling by adding machines. Other episodes look backward into Erlang and sideways into languages such as Crystal, using comparison to sharpen what Elixir gains and loses. Nerves episodes push the stack into hardware, including mechanical keyboards, PCBs, Raspberry Pi boards, BeagleBone boards, and firmware experiments. The show’s rhythm is informal but technical. Panelists interrupt, clarify, admit when something is advanced, and push guests for the working explanation. It is not only about greenfield enthusiasm. Books, articles, open-source tools, deployment targets, and community projects all surface as part of the craft. Some excerpts include sponsor reads, but the editorial body of the show is a community roundtable for people who care about how software is actually assembled.
Made for: Elixir developers, backend engineers, Phoenix users, and curious polyglot programmers who want grounded conversations about tools, systems, and tradeoffs. It is especially useful for listeners comfortable with technical vocabulary and real implementation detail.
What sets it apart: The show pairs ecosystem breadth with hands-on specificity: type validation, language interop, distributed clustering, hardware builds, and Erlang influence all sit in the same feed. Its panel format makes advanced topics feel examined rather than merely announced.
Join our weekly discussion of the popular functional language built on top of the Erlang virtual machine. Each week, we discuss the world of Elxiir, Phoenix, OTP, and then BEAM. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/elixir-mix--6102049/support.
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Elixir Mix connects Elixir's abstractions to working systems through technically alert interviews about libraries, hardware, distributed architecture, and language interoperability.
Elixir Mix puts working software questions in front of guests who have built something concrete, then lets Sophie DiBenedetto and its rotating panels follow the engineering choices underneath.
A mechanical keyboard running Elixir makes your next unnecessary side project look suspiciously reasonable.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A practical look at runtime validation in Elixir, with Domo and Dialyzer in focus.
The episode keeps its focus on runtime validation in Elixir and makes Domo feel concrete rather than abstract. Ivan Rublev explains why he built it, why Dialyzer helps but does not quite fit the runtime job, and how Domo writes generated validation code into `_build` so…
A clear case for keeping Elixir central until another tool clearly earns its place.
Elixir and Python meet at a practical boundary here: image recognition, real-time work, and the question of when a Phoenix stack should reach outside itself. The guest's finance background keeps the discussion grounded in shipping code, not language tribalism.
A practical look at equal-node clusters, hash-based placement, and quorum.
The episode offers a clear take on equal-node distributed design, where new nodes join a cluster and slices of a namespace are spread by hash space.
A practical Erlang defense that uses Crystal and Elixir to sharpen a broader language debate.
Elixir Mix spends the hour on Todd Rezadek's case for embracing Erlang, and the panel keeps that argument lively as it branches into Crystal, Ruby, and the ways language communities set expectations.
A keyboard build story that gets into firmware, boards, and the messy fun of making hardware.
This episode follows Chris Dose from LSU workshops in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP to Peak in San Francisco, where he began learning Elixir, and it keeps the focus on the hardware work at hand.
Linux talk with hands-on scars.
Kubernetes changes, explained by the people who made them.
Ruby talk with the edges left on.
A weekly discussion about the Elixir programming language, Phoenix framework, and the BEAM virtual machine, featuring interviews with developers.
Ivan Rublev describes Domo on Elixir Mix as a library for validating structs against type specs and precondition functions.
Alvise Susmel says a 30-fps, three-megabyte frame can round-trip through an Elixir port in about half a millisecond.
Mariano Guerra, co-founder of Instadeck, joins Mark Erickson, Josh Adams, and guest host Sophie DiBenedetto to discuss Riak Core, Partisan, and TLA+.
Todd Rezadek says Elixir developers should learn "how the Beam works" and reach for Erlang's `:queue` instead of adding a dependency.
["Chris Dose describes a Nerves-based keyboard prototype that runs Phoenix on the device, exposes USB ethernet, and previews animations in the browser.", "He says he has been a software engineer for about 13 years, starting at LSU in Louisiana, then moving to San Francisco and spending a little over six and a half years at Peak.", "Peak moved from Ruby into Elixir after a new engineer pushed the language internally, and Chris says the company now builds new services in Elixir while legacy systems stay in Ruby.", "He also covers Peak's open-source libraries, including Cocktail for recurrence rules, Xcal, and Ectodiff, plus a production rule that keeps naive date times and uses Kubernetes with libcluster over DNS."]
Adolfo Neto teaches logic and functional programming at the Federal University of Technology Paraná, where his optional Elixir course recently had four students.
Charles Max Wood, Sujin Roe, and Alex Bush consider how coronavirus layoffs and isolation might create new options without treating illness or death as positive.
Adolfo Neto, a computer science professor at Federal University of Technology Paraná, teaches an optional functional-programming course that had four students in its latest offering.
AJ Foster created Pluralsight's Elixir the Big Picture to help technology leaders evaluate Elixir for business projects.
Bruce Tate describes Elixir Chat, a weekly mentorship program for underrepresented people, built on three beliefs: programmers learn to code by coding, mistakes in front of others are vulnerable, and mentors must 'lead with love and respect.' He recounts how Flora, a marketer who attended the Gig City Elixir conference in Chattanooga with her newborn, was hired by HCA and now gives conference talks.
An interview with Andrea Lepardi about her journey in Elixir and work on the Alexa Core team.
An interview with Josh Adams about using Elixir for energy management solutions at GridPoint.
Host Alan and guest Adi Iyengar discuss Adi's newly released book on Elixir, covering the two-year writing process and tools used.