Elixir community news with honest reactions attached.
Thinking Elixir Podcast is a two-voice news show about the Elixir ecosystem, with Mark Erickson and David Bernheisel working through community links and saying plainly what they make of each. The subjects run from a redesigned Hex site and package security to Python and JavaScript projects built around the BEAM.
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Thinking Elixir Podcast is a conversational news show about the Elixir programming language and the projects and people around it. Two voices carry it, Mark Erickson and David Bernheisel, and each episode opens on the same short welcome before the news begins. The format is simple. One voice raises an item, the other reacts, and the two say what they make of it, with links gathered in the show notes. That candor is the draw. When Dexter, a new language server written in Go, turns up, the reaction mixes admiration for starting from scratch with a plain wish for one strong tool rather than a fourth, given that Expert is already the official option. When Jose Valim announces distributed Python on top of Erlang distribution, with Livebook integration, they remark on how casually the announcement landed. Security is the subject the show keeps circling. Episode 298, 'Hex Gets a Glow Up', sets a redesigned Hex website, which now renders each package readme in place, beside talk of downgrade attacks and attackers publishing from breached maintainer machines. Elsewhere the pair urge community backing for an EEF grant bid that would fund two full years of the AEGIS Security Project, aimed at how packages are published, verified and trusted across Hex. Even a story shared by Zach Daniel, about a developer moving a site from Next.js to Phoenix and Ash, turns on supply chain worries in the JavaScript world. Tooling and releases are the other steady beat. The Elixir 1.20 release candidates arrive with a compiler that finds more bugs and runs faster, and Phoenix Test earns a recommendation for anyone starting a fresh Phoenix project. The BEAM reaching outward gets its own attention: Volt and QuickBeam come up in an episode titled 'JavaScript Joins the BEAM?', alongside a WASM and LiveView example that turns a large file into a SQLite database without it ever reaching the server. AI tooling runs underneath all of it, from package docs made friendlier to coding agents and LLMs to a usage rules feature that lets package authors ship whole skills to a project. Titles such as 'Is Your Type System Leaking?' and 'OpenAI Chose Elixir and A VM Inside a VMV' hint at how wide the net goes. The community itself gets room too. One episode starts with a call-out arguing that companies benefiting from the ecosystem for free should put money behind it. Another closes by sending listeners to a newly launched podcast whose first episode featured Andrea Leopardi on concurrency, OTP and the evolution of the BEAM. A friendly starting point is episode 286, 'A NextJS Escape and 2025 in Review', where the news gives way to a look back at 2025 and the trends the two noticed. The episodes end on a recurring sign-off, at least once after a tangent about pizza toppings, Brazilian sushi pizza included.
Made for: Suits a listener who works in Elixir or is circling the language and wants a conversational way to keep up with Hex, Phoenix, language servers and new releases without reading every changelog.
What sets it apart: Suits someone who wants opinions alongside the headlines: one voice admits uncertainty about a new language server, the pair press for community backing of a package security grant, and Python, JavaScript and WASM work around the BEAM is treated as part of the Elixir story.
The Thinking Elixir podcast is a weekly show where we talk about the Elixir programming language and the community around it. We cover news and interview guests to learn more about projects and developments in the community.Whether you are already experienced with Elixir or just exploring the language, this show is created with you in mind. We discuss community news, Functional Programming, transitioning from OOP, coding conventions, and more.Guests visit the show to help challenge our assumptions, learn about new developments and grow in the process.Subscribe to join us on this journey!
When your Elixir project won't compile, even your LSP's silence becomes podcast material.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A grounded Elixir news round-up on package trust, editor tooling, and the cost of too many language-server choices.
Thinking Elixir frames Elixir supply-chain security as community work, led by the EEF's grant-seeking two-year AEGIS Security Project. The episode explains how the effort could strengthen the way packages are published, verified, and trusted across HEX and the broader ecosystem.
HexPM's redesign opens into a practical discussion of package security, maintainer risk, and authorization friction.
HexPM's redesign gives this Thinking Elixir conversation a clear way in. Mark Erickson and David Bernheisel point to a library page that now renders the README while keeping GitHub links close at hand, making Hex feel more useful as a first stop for learning about a package.
A practical community-news episode with a concrete browser-side SQLite hook.
Thinking Elixir keeps a practical line through Elixir Vault, beginning with Volt's push to replace the ES build wrapper, Tailwind CLI, and node modules in Phoenix asset work.
A practical Elixir community update ties faster compilation, browser testing, and Python cells in Livebook.
Elixir 1.20.0 gets a grounded pass in this community-news episode, with RC.2 and RC.3 framed around compiler fixes, about 10% faster compilation, a new interpreted mode that can benefit from more cores, and less recompilation after struct definition changes.
A grounded Elixir episode on sponsorship, shared workflows, and the maintenance behind the Beam community.
The episode frames the Elixir ecosystem as collective labor, with Mark Erickson and David Bernheisel starting from the ethics of sponsorship. Companies can benefit from community work without paying into it, while individual developers may want to help but struggle to know where…
Power Platform news with practical static.
The hosts discuss the release of Elixir 1.19.0RC.1, including compatibility with Erlang OTP 28.1, struct update syntax, compilation improvements, and logger metadata changes.
Thinking Elixir Podcast 299 centers on two supply-chain security stories: the EEF’s AEGIS grant push and Hex PM’s first comprehensive third-party audit.
Thinking Elixir Podcast 298, "Hex Gets a Glow Up," opens with a HexPM redesign that now renders each package README directly on the page and lets users copy dependency lines to the clipboard.
Thinking Elixir Podcast 297 centers on Volt and QuickBeam, two projects that push more front-end tooling into Elixir and the BEAM.
Thinking Elixir Podcast 296 covers Elixir version 1.20.0 RC.2 and RC.3, including a compiler claim that it finds more bugs for free, compiles about 10% faster, and has an interpreted mode that can go up to five times faster.
Thinking Elixir Podcast 295 opens with a direct ask for companies to sponsor the Erlang Ecosystem Foundation at earlef.org, with Mark Erickson framing it as support for Elixir’s community infrastructure.
Expert, the unified Elixir language server combining Lexical and Next LS, published its first tagged release, 0.1.0 RC1, with a roadmap running from 0.1 to 0.4.
Hackney 3.1 adds HTTP3 (QUIC) client support through a pure Erlang library, reportedly removing 1.3 million lines of C code tied to LSQUIC and BoringSSL.
Mark Erickson announces Sagents, his new Elixir agent library, which ships with a middleware system, subagents, human-in-the-loop tool approval, and a Phoenix LiveView debugger.
The hosts discuss community news, including a developer who switched from Next.js/React to Elixir/Phoenix/Ash due to supply chain issues, and preview a 2025 recap.
The hosts discuss the release of Expert, the new official Elixir LSP, and how to install it on various editors.
This episode covers community news including the new TideWave web service and a blog post on interoperability beyond the Erlang VM, with a teaser for an interview with Jose Valim.
The hosts discuss the release of Live Debugger 0.3.0, a browser-based tool for debugging LiveView applications, highlighting new features like Firefox extension and global callback traces.