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**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay. So Jerod, if you're not listening, it's okay, and if you are listening, what's up with the meta-costs? I don't know anything about it, but... Yeah - what's up with it? That's what I'm wondering. |
**Lars Wikman:** Yeah. But it was very fun to get a chance to work with Jerod and the Changelog codebase in a slightly dedicated fashion. So it was a few months... That would have been last summer that I spent some time with this codebase. Then I introduced Alex when I didn't have time anymore, and he seems to have tor... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** He did, yes. Definitely. The PromEx stuff I think is the one that I got the most excited about, because it touches on the infrastructure side of things; it just integrates a couple of things together, so that it is from my perspective very visible and something which I'm very interested in to see how ... |
The N+1 optimizations, improvements, N+1 query improvements - that was great to see as well. I didn't know that you were the cause for it, so... I'm not sure how I feel about that. \[laughs\] |
**Lars Wikman:** I think I only introduced one fairly chunky case of them. It was mostly when you're doing development that it turned things a little bit slow to start, because I was doing something optimistic, but it didn't turn out... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I mean, the key takeaway from this little conversation is that you are deep into Elixir, into Erlang, into -- is Erlang fair to say? You're a co-host on BEAM Radio, so BEAM is all Erlang... |
**Lars Wikman:** Yeah. I'm very excited and enthusiastic about Erlang, but I don't write Erlang. I write Elixir. It runs on the same VM as Erlang, so all the Erlang technology benefits Elixir. A lot of the Elixir technology benefits Erlang, but it can't fully go in both directions, unfortunately. Mostly a technical rea... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay. |
**Lars Wikman:** But yeah, I am very invested in the BEAM ecosystem. BEAM is the name of the virtual machine... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Do you know what BEAM stands for? |
**Lars Wikman:** I think early on it was Bogdan's Something-something Machine. I don't remember exactly... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Erlang Abstract Machine... Bogdan's Erlang Abstract Machine. |
**Lars Wikman:** Exactly. Because initially, it was JAM, which was Joe's Abstract Machine, I imagine... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yes. Joe, you're still in our minds. I know that you're not listening, but those that know, Joe Armstrong, the co-creator of Erlang - you're still in our minds. Thank you for everything you've done. You've shipped a great thing into the world. |
**Lars Wikman:** Yeah. The BEAM and Erlang absolutely wild. It's been interesting that through many years I've heard of Erlang, and people have been like "That's a weird one, but it has some really strong ideas and it has some really strong features", and it's like "Oh, okay. Whatever." I don't really do FP; it wasn't ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Which are your top three favorite BEAM features? |
**Lars Wikman:** \[08:07\] Concurrency and parallelism at the same time, for essentially no extra effort. It makes you do concurrency and parallelism correctly and reasonably, without tripping you into sort of mutable state and the dangers of concurrency and parallelism. So that's one. |
Then there's the whole resiliency thing, which is built on sort of the same idea, or some of the same ideas, where there will be things that happen to your application that are unexpected, that you can't really catch with just catching an exception. Maybe the disk was full, maybe the service you were talking to was dow... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay. Apparently there is a typed Erlang syntax, DSL, coming from Facebook. I say Facebook, but it's really WhatsApp... I keep forgetting its name, but something-Muskała... Do you know who I'm referring to? |
**Lars Wikman:** Oh, yeah, Michał Muskała is the guy that, as far as I know, started the effort, or was probably leading the effort... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That's right. |
**Lars Wikman:** I spoke to him once in Prague. That was before he was at WhatsApp. But that's a super-interesting effort, and I think that type system makes perfect sense for what they need. They're a very large organization... But I don't really find it compelling for building the kind of web apps and systems that I ... |
I'm very, very happy with having a dynamic language. I come from Python and PHP originally, so that's... Yeah, the Ruby lineage of Elixir works fine with what I'm used to. It was a fairly easy transition, all things considered. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That is a really good top three. So we have a good idea of why you like Erlang, and which are the top three features of the BEAM... Specifically I say Erlang. When I'm saying Erlang, I'm referring to the ecosystem more, the virtual machine, and less the programming language. So that makes a lot of sen... |
**Lars Wikman:** So that very much depends on context. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Let's take the last one. The last Elixir app that you had to -- and whether it's a service -- I mean, you can tell me about it. How did you ship it? |
**Lars Wikman:** So right now I've been spending part of my day setting up a Docker file, so that'll tell you something... So Elixir and Erlang have this idea of releases, where you bundle everything, including the runtime, into a nice little package that you can just shove into a server and start, without needing any ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** OpenSSL is always the trickiest. |
**Lars Wikman:** Yeah, OpenSSL, and usually ncurses. Libncurses. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah, if you need that... But yes. I know OpenSSL - you will definitely need that, because you will be doing some sort of encryption somehow; it doesn't matter how... But ncursus is -- |
**Lars Wikman:** \[12:13\] There's always encryption in there somewhere... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Exactly. |
**Lars Wikman:** So I think releases are sort of my ideal for keeping it very lean and just shipping it to a server... But in this case we're going to be doing on-prem deployments, so someone else is gonna set it up on their own hardware... And my plan is for them to be given a Docker compose file, some credentials, an... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Which one? |
**Lars Wikman:** In this case it will be Postgres, probably. It was built with MySQL, but I'm sort of transitioning it to Postgres. That's a little bit of a preference of mine. In this case, Docker is mostly serving as sort of being so industry-standard that it will be familiar to more operations people than actually j... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah, that's interesting, because I think if you are shipping just the app itself, then a binary - that's okay, right? It's an executable, you just run it, and off it starts. It's no different than, for example, a Docker container. Now, if you do have dependencies, like PostgreSQL, how do you get that... |
**Lars Wikman:** Yeah. And in this case, we would want to take care of all of that and just provide the docker-compose and go HAM. And whenever there's an update, maybe we need to tell them to pull a new docker-compose, or maybe they just need to update an image... But yeah, when you have additional infrastructure and ... |
But the way I do that is just the release that I actually build on the server, and stand up there... Because the availability level I need to maintain on that one is whatever I feel like. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That's a good one. I think that has merits. I mean, some use cases, that's perfectly fine; nothing wrong with that. It's all contextual, I keep mentioning this. If that works for you, that's great. There's no problem. And maybe someone could benefit from that simplicity. |
**Lars Wikman:** And that system particularly actually stores all its data in memory, and whenever I restart it, it just blows it away, it refetches it from the web... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That's interesting. Okay... |
**Lars Wikman:** It was a fun way of building it, mostly... It means I don't have to deal with any database setup for that particular service. I have a few different services where I just keep things around in memory, because they are fairly ephemeral, or the history isn't particularly important... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So what I'm hearing is they are stateless systems, stateless services, which means that you could start them anywhere, and they would get the data just in time, after they boot, or maybe part of the booting process. I'm not sure when exactly it happens. But there's no state that you have to move with ... |
For example, if you were to stand this beambloggers elsewhere, on boot it would get all the data that it needs, and would start serving it. It wouldn't need to run on a specific machine. |
**Lars Wikman:** \[16:14\] Yeah, so it's very -- at least very independent. It's stateful when it runs, in that it keeps a lot of state around... But it absolutely does not rely on some source of state, or needing to carefully manage state when it goes up and down. |
For some other services where I do want to keep history around, I've started using SQLite much more than I used to... Because that's also operationally much simpler than Postgres, and I don't find Postgres particularly challenging. It's easy enough to manage, and I like it, but SQLite is even easier, and makes a lot of... |
There was a Hacker News thread around the time that Litestream got some attention... It's done a few rounds. Someone mentioned running a product on SQLite, and I think they've benchmarked it to 10,000 reads a second, or 5,000 writes a second, on an NVMe drive... That's a lot of read and write activity; a lot more than ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That is a very good point, actually... Litestream - it will be in the show notes, but it's litestream.io. It's Ben B. Johnson. I think he was on Changelog at some point. I remember this coming up... And you're right, Ben Johnson - he's the author of BoltDB, so he has some experience in this area, let'... |
But my takeaway is that you like keeping things simple... And if it gets the job done, that's it, that's all it needs to be. It doesn't need to be fancy, it doesn't need to be impressive, it doesn't need to be "Look at me. I've done it in this way, that no one else has done it before." It doesn't have to be that. It ju... |
**Lars Wikman:** Yeah. |
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