Podcasts about libcluster

Building a sophisticated AI that can evolve to fit our vast and diverse needs is a Herculean challenge. Today we speak with senior engineer Eric Steen about Automata, his experimental Elixir project that uses neuroevolution and cutting edge theory to create a multi-agent behavior tree — or really good AI in the common tongue. But before we tap into that rich topic, we talk with Eric about tech burnout, his background, and why Elixir is an excellent language for writing modern software. He then unpacks AI concepts like the need to develop backpropagation in your system, and the value of “neural diversity,” and Markov decision processes. After Eric gives his take on architecture versus design and the place of domain-driven design, we discuss Automata. A key breakthrough, Eric shares his enthusiasm for ‘novelty search,’ where machines learn from a variety of new behaviors and searches, as opposed to completing one task at a time. We touch on Automata’s progress, Eric’s long-term approach, and what his project might be used for. Near the end of our interview, we chat about CryptoWise, a collaborative analysis platform for cryptocurrency. Todd Resudek then opens with another edition of Pattern Matching, where he interviews Whatsapp engineer Michał Muskała. They talk about Michał’s career, the movies and music that he enjoys, and the projects that excite him. Tune in to hear more about both Michał and neuroevolution in AI. Key Points From This Episode: Experiencing tech burnout and challenges around algorithms rendering you redundant. Hear about Eric’s programming background and shifts in the industry. Backpropagation and using Elixir to build a neural evolutionary system. How Markov decision processes help systems choose between possible actions. Eric’s take on architecture versus design and the place of domain-driven design. Exploring Automata — Eric’s ambitious multi-agent behavior tree. The importance of neurodiversity when building AIs; they need to adapt to many needs. Novelty search; why learn through one task when you can learn through a variety of tasks at the same time? Automata’s practical applications and why Eric sees it as a long-term project. Eric shares a progress report on his work and using design processes like Sprint. What Eric would like people to use Automata for. A sense that Elixir is gaining in popularity within Silicon Valley. Eric gives an elevator-pitch for CryptoWise, a collaborative analysis platform for cryptocurrency. Todd Resudek interviews Michał Muskała on another edition of Pattern Matching. Michał shares his background and his move from Poland to London. Movies and music that Michał enjoys, and details on projects that excite him. Differences between Erlang and Elixir and why both communities would benefit from working together. Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode: SmartLogic — https://smartlogic.io/ Eric Steen on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericsteen1/ Eric Steen — https://twitter.com/thesteener Webflow — https://webflow.com/ Automata GitHub — https://github.com/upstarter/automata Automata on Slack — https://join.slack.com/t/automata-project/sharedinvite/zt-e4fqrmo4-7ujuZwzXHNCGVrZb1aVmA CryptoWise — https://www.cryptowise.ai/ Hippo Insurance — https://www.hippo.com/ Carl Hewitt — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CarlHewitt Stanford University — https://www.stanford.edu/ MIT — https://web.mit.edu/ Actor Model — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actormodel Marvin Minsky — http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/ Tensorflex on GitHub— https://github.com/anshuman23/tensorflex Matrex on GitHub — https://github.com/versilov/matrex Handbook of Neuroevolution Through Erlang — https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9781461444626 Markov Decision Process — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markovdecisionprocess Amazon Web Services — https://aws.amazon.com/ The Little Elixir & OTP Guidebook — https://www.amazon.com/Little-Elixir-OTP-Guidebook/dp/1633430111 Elon Musk — https://www.forbes.com/profile/elon-musk/ Welcome to the Era of Deep Neuroevolution — https://eng.uber.com/deep-neuroevolution/ Kenneth O. Stanley — https://www.cs.ucf.edu/~kstanley/ Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective — https://www.amazon.com/Why-Greatness-Cannot-Planned-Objective/dp/3319155237/ University of Florida — https://www.ufl.edu/ Uber Air — https://www.uber.com/us/es/elevate/ Jeff Bezos — https://www.forbes.com/profile/jeff-bezos/ Sprint — https://www.thesprintbook.com/ Adobe — https://www.adobe.com/ Horde — https://www.horde.org/development/ Libcluster on GitHub — https://github.com/dsteinberg/libcluster Swift for Tensorflow — https://www.tensorflow.org/swift Triplebyte Blog — https://triplebyte.com/blog EquiTrader — https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/equitrader/ BloXroute Labs — https://bloxroute.com/ Holochain — https://holochain.org/ Michał Muskała on GitHub — https://github.com/michalmuskala Jason on GitHub — https://github.com/michalmuskala/jason Todd Resudek on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/toddresudek/ Whatsapp — https://www.whatsapp.com/ CERN — https://home.cern/ Ralph Kaminski — https://ralphkaminski.com/ Jayme Edwards — https://jaymeedwards.com/ Special Guest: Eric Steen.

Episode Summary   In this week’s episode of Elixir Mix the panel follows up with Wiebe-Marten ("Marten") Wijnja about his talk at Elixir Conf EU, where he spoke about the distributed system his team was working on.    They start by discussing the eight fallacies of distributed computing that Marten talked about in talk. He lays out a couple of the fallacies and invites listeners to watch his talk for all eight. Marten explains that these fallacies most commonly happen to developers who are used to working with a single system. The panel discusses how to be mindful of these mistakes and how developers take for granted of how easy one system is to use.    Marten gives some tool recommendations to help with these fallacies. TLA+ is a small programming language that lets the developer describe their system and it will point out when something is wrong but it works purely on concepts. Erlang quick check implementation is also a tool that will help combat these problems. The last suggestion which was given by the panel is a library called comcast on github that will simulate poor network connections so the developer can see how the system runs on a poor connection.    Marten describes the byzantine problem. Two nodes or generals are trying to agree on something but communication keeps failing. The various outcomes are considered and Mark Ericksen gives an additional example of he and Josh Adams trying to connect to record a podcast, and how the miscommunication could change the outcome. This is a big problem that complicates using a distributed system.    The panel discussed CRDT’s and how they are a better way for nodes to sync up. Marten gives a very simple example of a CRDT as a counter. The panel discusses when to use CRDT’s and when not too. Marten explains what questions to ask before using CRDT’s.    Another way of solving the byzantine problem is by connecting the nodes. The panel discusses the tools they use to connect their nodes. Partisan is one tool, instead of connecting all nodes, each node connects to a specific number of nodes. That way if one node goes down the whole system doesn’t stop, while at the same time not, overwhelming the nodes. Libcluster, another tool, uses Kubernetes and has multiple strategies for connecting nodes so developers can choose the right one for their system.     The panel asks Marten about multicall and abcast. Marten explains that these tools help one node talk to all the other nodes in a cluster, and multicall will gather the results. Multicall also tells the developer which nodes failed to respond to the request. Mark shares an example of using these tools to effectively communicate between gen servers.    In Marten’s talk, he described four distributed databases. The panel asks Marten to talk about each one of them. The first one is mnesia. Marten talks about his first experience with Mnesia and how he thought it was amazing. He soon realized while it is still a great tool it also has its quirks.    He explains that each of these databases has its own quirks. Mnesia doesn't do conflict resolution, that along with a few other things the developer will need to build themselves. This can be a good and bad thing because developers can customize the database to their needs but it’s not ready out of the box. Mark explains the use cases mnesia is good for and even references the mnesia documentation.     Cassandra is the next database Marten describes. Cassandra is the database discord uses. Cassandra does not let developers control their own conflict resolution. It always uses the latest time-stamp and with nodes that can be confusing.    Couchdb is another database they discuss. Again, couchdb is also not made to deal with conflicts. It will either solve them randomly or the developer can opt into resolving it themselves. The panel discusses times when this is useful, such as when connectivity is intermittent.    Riak is the final database and the one Marten’s team chose for their distributed system project. Riak was written in Erlang and is a key-value store and uses CRDT’s. It uses a CRDT conflict resolution. Marten shares his experience using Riak. The panel considers Riak’s history and need for some love.     Marten gives an update on planga, the chat application they were building the distributed system for. Marten explains that during the talk they were in the middle of development. He shares the story of why they wanted a distributed system for this chat application. The client they were doing it for wanted to do video streaming but pulled out in the end. When the client no longer needed the video streaming solution they stopped building the distributed system. Marten is still hopeful they will go back and finish it.    To end the episode Marten shares his programming journey. He started programming at age nine. At age 12 he started doing professional web development. After a few years of that, he started doing some frontend work in JavaScript. Once that got old, bitcoin was getting big so he and some friends got into that. Finally, he got a job doing backend work with Ruby while at university. When he heard about Elixir he was so excited he learned the basics in one weekend and has loved it ever since.  Panelists Mark Ericksen Josh Adams Guest Wiebe-Marten ("Marten") Wijnja Sponsors   Sentry– use the code “devchat” for two months free on Sentry’s small plan Adventures in DevOps My Ruby Story CacheFly Links Wiebe Marten Wijnja - An adventure in distributed programming - ElixirConf EU 2019 https://elixirforum.com/  https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/tla/tla.html  http://www.quviq.com/products/erlang-quickcheck/  https://github.com/tylertreat/Comcast  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault#Byzantine_Generals'_Problem  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-free_replicated_data_type  https://github.com/bitwalker/libcluster  http://partisan.cloud/  http://erlang.org/doc/man/mnesia.html  https://learnyousomeerlang.com/mnesia  How Discord Stores Billions of Messages  https://pouchdb.com/  https://planga.io/  https://riak.com/  https://github.com/basho/riak_core  https://riak.com/where-to-start-with-riak-core/  Using Erlang, Riak and the ORSWOT CRDT at bet365 (...) - Michael Owen - Erlang User Conference 2015  https://hex.pm/packages/effects  https://github.com/graninas/automatic-whitebox-testing-showcase  https://github.com/Qqwy/elixir-riak_ecto3 https://hex.pm/packages/sea  https://twitter.com/WiebeMarten  https://github.com/qqwy/  https://wmcode.nl  https://www.facebook.com/Elixir-Mix  https://twitter.com/elixir_mix Picks Mark Ericksen: ElixirConf YouTube Channel  Josh Adams: Automatic White-Box Testing with Free Monads  Wiebe-Marten ("Marten") Wijnja: https://propertesting.com/  https://globalgamejam.org/ https://polyphasic.net/

Episode Summary   In this week’s episode of Elixir Mix the panel follows up with Wiebe-Marten ("Marten") Wijnja about his talk at Elixir Conf EU, where he spoke about the distributed system his team was working on.    They start by discussing the eight fallacies of distributed computing that Marten talked about in talk. He lays out a couple of the fallacies and invites listeners to watch his talk for all eight. Marten explains that these fallacies most commonly happen to developers who are used to working with a single system. The panel discusses how to be mindful of these mistakes and how developers take for granted of how easy one system is to use.    Marten gives some tool recommendations to help with these fallacies. TLA+ is a small programming language that lets the developer describe their system and it will point out when something is wrong but it works purely on concepts. Erlang quick check implementation is also a tool that will help combat these problems. The last suggestion which was given by the panel is a library called comcast on github that will simulate poor network connections so the developer can see how the system runs on a poor connection.    Marten describes the byzantine problem. Two nodes or generals are trying to agree on something but communication keeps failing. The various outcomes are considered and Mark Ericksen gives an additional example of he and Josh Adams trying to connect to record a podcast, and how the miscommunication could change the outcome. This is a big problem that complicates using a distributed system.    The panel discussed CRDT’s and how they are a better way for nodes to sync up. Marten gives a very simple example of a CRDT as a counter. The panel discusses when to use CRDT’s and when not too. Marten explains what questions to ask before using CRDT’s.    Another way of solving the byzantine problem is by connecting the nodes. The panel discusses the tools they use to connect their nodes. Partisan is one tool, instead of connecting all nodes, each node connects to a specific number of nodes. That way if one node goes down the whole system doesn’t stop, while at the same time not, overwhelming the nodes. Libcluster, another tool, uses Kubernetes and has multiple strategies for connecting nodes so developers can choose the right one for their system.     The panel asks Marten about multicall and abcast. Marten explains that these tools help one node talk to all the other nodes in a cluster, and multicall will gather the results. Multicall also tells the developer which nodes failed to respond to the request. Mark shares an example of using these tools to effectively communicate between gen servers.    In Marten’s talk, he described four distributed databases. The panel asks Marten to talk about each one of them. The first one is mnesia. Marten talks about his first experience with Mnesia and how he thought it was amazing. He soon realized while it is still a great tool it also has its quirks.    He explains that each of these databases has its own quirks. Mnesia doesn't do conflict resolution, that along with a few other things the developer will need to build themselves. This can be a good and bad thing because developers can customize the database to their needs but it’s not ready out of the box. Mark explains the use cases mnesia is good for and even references the mnesia documentation.     Cassandra is the next database Marten describes. Cassandra is the database discord uses. Cassandra does not let developers control their own conflict resolution. It always uses the latest time-stamp and with nodes that can be confusing.    Couchdb is another database they discuss. Again, couchdb is also not made to deal with conflicts. It will either solve them randomly or the developer can opt into resolving it themselves. The panel discusses times when this is useful, such as when connectivity is intermittent.    Riak is the final database and the one Marten’s team chose for their distributed system project. Riak was written in Erlang and is a key-value store and uses CRDT’s. It uses a CRDT conflict resolution. Marten shares his experience using Riak. The panel considers Riak’s history and need for some love.     Marten gives an update on planga, the chat application they were building the distributed system for. Marten explains that during the talk they were in the middle of development. He shares the story of why they wanted a distributed system for this chat application. The client they were doing it for wanted to do video streaming but pulled out in the end. When the client no longer needed the video streaming solution they stopped building the distributed system. Marten is still hopeful they will go back and finish it.    To end the episode Marten shares his programming journey. He started programming at age nine. At age 12 he started doing professional web development. After a few years of that, he started doing some frontend work in JavaScript. Once that got old, bitcoin was getting big so he and some friends got into that. Finally, he got a job doing backend work with Ruby while at university. When he heard about Elixir he was so excited he learned the basics in one weekend and has loved it ever since.  Panelists Mark Ericksen Josh Adams Guest Wiebe-Marten ("Marten") Wijnja Sponsors   Sentry– use the code “devchat” for two months free on Sentry’s small plan Adventures in DevOps My Ruby Story CacheFly Links Wiebe Marten Wijnja - An adventure in distributed programming - ElixirConf EU 2019 https://elixirforum.com/  https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/tla/tla.html  http://www.quviq.com/products/erlang-quickcheck/  https://github.com/tylertreat/Comcast  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault#Byzantine_Generals'_Problem  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-free_replicated_data_type  https://github.com/bitwalker/libcluster  http://partisan.cloud/  http://erlang.org/doc/man/mnesia.html  https://learnyousomeerlang.com/mnesia  How Discord Stores Billions of Messages  https://pouchdb.com/  https://planga.io/  https://riak.com/  https://github.com/basho/riak_core  https://riak.com/where-to-start-with-riak-core/  Using Erlang, Riak and the ORSWOT CRDT at bet365 (...) - Michael Owen - Erlang User Conference 2015  https://hex.pm/packages/effects  https://github.com/graninas/automatic-whitebox-testing-showcase  https://github.com/Qqwy/elixir-riak_ecto3 https://hex.pm/packages/sea  https://twitter.com/WiebeMarten  https://github.com/qqwy/  https://wmcode.nl  https://www.facebook.com/Elixir-Mix  https://twitter.com/elixir_mix Picks Mark Ericksen: ElixirConf YouTube Channel  Josh Adams: Automatic White-Box Testing with Free Monads  Wiebe-Marten ("Marten") Wijnja: https://propertesting.com/  https://globalgamejam.org/ https://polyphasic.net/

We sat down with numerous developers, including José Valim and Chris McCord, during the Saturday lunch at Lonestar ElixirConf 2019 (https://lonestarelixir.com/2019/). Hear what they had to say about the state of Elixir! Guests: José Valim - Creator of Elixir (https://elixir-lang.org/) Chris McCord - Creator of Phoenix (https://phoenixframework.org/) Paul Schoenfelder - Creator of Distillery (https://github.com/bitwalker/distillery), Timex (https://github.com/bitwalker/timex), Libcluster (https://github.com/bitwalker/libcluster), and many others Chris Keathley - Host of Elixir Outlaws (https://elixiroutlaws.com/), developer at Bleacher Report (https://bleacherreport.com/) Amos King - Host of Elixir Outlaws (https://elixiroutlaws.com/) Jim Freeze - Organizer of ElixirConf (https://elixirconf.com/), ElixirConf EU (http://www.elixirconf.eu/), and others Susumu Yamazaki - Creator of Hastega (https://github.com/zeam-vm/hastega) Brian Cardarella - CEO of Dockyard (https://dockyard.com/) Osa Gaius - Engineer at Mailchimp (https://mailchimp.com/) Spectating: Bruce Tate and Ben Marx 00:00 - Intro 01:47 - LoneStar begins 02:03 - Panelists introduce themselves 09:15 - Where is Elixir going? 10:14 - Releases 19:04 - The issue with hype 26:30 - Osa Intro 29:00 - Define lists 40:00 - How can Elixir displace Java? Learn more about how SmartLogic uses Phoenix and Elixir. (https://smr.tl/2Hyslu8)

Panel: Mark Ericksen Josh Adams Nate Hopkins Charles Max Wood Special Guest: Eric Oestrich In this episode of Elixir Mix, the panel talks with Eric Oestrich who is a web developer who resides in Indianapolis, Indiana. He and the panel talk about ExVenture, Gossip, Cowboy, Raisin, Grapevine, and much more! Listen to today’s episode to hear all about it! Finally, check out Eric’s ElixirConf talk and his blog, too! Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job!  0:51 – Charles introduces the panel. 1:14 – Nate talks about his background. 1:27 – Chuck: My first programming job I worked with Nate. Nate also works now with Eric Berry. We have a special guest and that is Eric Oestrich. Tell us who you are, please! 1:55 – Eric: I work for Smart Logic, LLC. We are a consultancy who has moved to Elixir for the last 2 years. 2:14 – Chuck: Tell us what ExVenture is? 2:46 – Eric: Late 80’s to mid-90’s it’s like a MUD tech space game. Eric goes into detail of what ExVenture is. 3:28 – Panel: Familiar with MUDS. 3:36 – Panel: Audience can’t tell that Eric isn’t an old guy. Eric – you aren’t an old gentleman – how did you get into it?! 4:02 – Eric: The concept has fascinated me. It’s pure game mechanics. In school I wrote things in Python and try to make it threaded. Never got it going. After that I wanted to do a MUD but not good enough in C and couldn’t get it working in Ruby neither. But one faithful day (a year ago) I got an echo and chat server and now we have a MUD. 5:02 – Panel: Why should you be interested? I will tell you why. ExVenture is an open source... I encourage everyone to dig into and play with it! It is a game (so that makes it more fun) but you are dealing with game mechanics. I am also curious where you wanted this to go? What made you say: I want to create this and make it open source? 6:37 – Eric: I like it and work has mostly played for it. It’s MIT because of that. Early in the project (between client work) it was a common thread and that’s why it’s open source. 7:27 – Panel: I ran into you at the conference and you were showing me... Talk about getting metrics out of your system, please? 8:20 – Eric answers the question. 9:09 – Panel: When people are trying to get metrics out of their system – what EVEN makes a good metric? 9:21- Eric: I am trying to figure that out myself, actually. I want to know how long it takes for someone to login? Is that someone trying to hack into my system? If you speak at a global channel or something else... Eric goes into more detail. Eric also mentions Prometheus. 10:31 – Panel: You mentioned: What would you want to see on a dashboard? 11:01 – Eric answers the question and mentions Prometheus EX. 12:19 – Panel: As you starting building this you were pulling libraries out of it and making them separate libraries. Are you pretty proud of GOSSIP? 12:37 – Eric: Yes! Gossip is based on web sockets and it’s a cowboy socket. Eric talks about Gossip. 13:10 – Panel: What other clients are you trying to support? 13:15 – Eric: There is a JavaScript client and Node-based game called... There is a bundle system for that. There is also a Python option. The one thing we haven’t done yet is a C client. That is important b/c most of the games that you could connect to are 25-30 years old. 14:26 – Panel asks a question. 14:34 – Eric: That is the C client we are waiting for. 14:43 – Panel: You talked at the conference (see the show notes) you talked about things you learned along the way. Can you talk about your process? What kind of bottlenecks and how did you resolve those issues? 15:10 – Eric answers the question. 16:44 – Panel: Did you run out of processes? 16:47 – Eric: The VM shut-off – it was just done. That was the first go-around. 19:27 – Eric: After the ElixirConf, I wanted to see how far I could push it. Eric continues. 19:51 – Panel: I want to identify some of these principles you just talked about. First, the major block was the gen server is a single process. 20:21 – Panel. 20:24 – Panel: I think that is a common mistake when people come to Elixir in the beginning stages. How did you solve it? 20:50 – Panelist answers the above question. 21:30 – Panel: That’s one of the big things. It’s an architectural issue. Second, you mentioned really LARGE messages. You were sending around really large messages. 22:20 – Eric: For every 100 players was a gigabyte of ram – it was a lot. And that was mostly b/c every copy...when a new character enters the room then that message gets sent out then it gets copied again, and... 23:08 – Panel. 23:24 – Panel: The third one you mentioned was around data base blocking or...? Can you talk about this one a little more, please? 23:33 – Eric answers the question. 24:02 – Panel. 24:30 – Eric: It was always saving...I tricked Echo into saving...There is a lot of things that could be better to save specifically faster. 24:52 – Panel: I think people would hit those 3 points eventually – there is a lot of value to that. 25:09 –Eric: Yes that was near the end of my ElixirConf talk and my blog. 25:23 – Panel. 25:33 – Eric: It came out in May and I figured out that I needed to learn how to cluster in Elixir. That’s what the ElixirConf was a bout from single node to multiple nodes. Eric continues. 28:38 – Panel: When you have a cluster – and I join – when I transfer from one room to another room, I could be passed off to another server or node? 29:01 – Eric: Whatever you mean by “being passed off.” Whatever server you land on that’s the one you will be on. The magic is that... 30:08 – Advertisement: Fresh Books! 31:15 – Panel: I am going through the code base now and I am excited. It’s going to help me get better at Elixir. 31:32 – Eric: That’s the point of ExVenture. 31:48 – Panel: You host a server so people can see what it’s about – and that’s Mid Mud, right? 32:09 – Eric: Yep, the first hour of you playing. There is a town crier, you request, and then combat monsters. Also, it is plugged into Gossip and you can talk to them. 32:44 – Eric: Yep, there you go: player logged-in! 32:55 – Panel: Maybe not b/c it will turn into a new podcast soon. 33:07 – Panel: What if I want to use Gossip, what is involved there? 33:16 – Eric: Gossip.Haus/docs – Go there! Set it up and start sending and receiving events. 34:40 – Panel: When I was trying to understand the Prometheus metrics it helped. And then in downloading it (as a tip), for me, it was easy to use the DOCKER instructions. 35:32 – Eric: Yep, that was done by a community member. 35:40 – Panel: Are you looking for people to contribute? 35:50 – Eric: Yep, I have a public Trello board. There are 2 tags. 36:12 – Panel: Sounds like you have people involved? 36:22 – Eric: Bunch of people came on after the ElixirConf. 36:33 – Panel: If people download it (another tip) in the SEEDS file you will find out the admin username and password. I guess that’s something you can add. Login: ADMIN and Password: PASSWORD. What I thought was fun (playing with it) in the admin screen I got a sense that it’s generic enough that I could create a space game. Like playing with sectors of space. Does that make sense? 37:42 – Eric: I don’t want it to be tied JUST to fantasy b/c that’s what MUD is. Everything should be good for historical/ fantasy/ etc. any genre that you want to do! 38:13 – Panel: I could see a HackFest and the company could create one for their business. You could have a lot of fun with it. 38:38 – Panel. 38:44 – Panel: Hidden things on their websites. 38:50 – Eric: Search TEXT ADVENTURE in Google Search. See show notes below. 39:24 – Panel: There is a whole subculture that people are interested in and I didn’t know that these people existed. I think that is interesting. 39:45 – Eric: There are tons of games out there that are 20+ years old! 39:55 – Panel: What is your favorite old school MUD game? 40:02 – Eric lists his favorite old school games! One of them is Achaea! 40:51 – Panel: I like the status bars are really cool. If you haven’t played it you have a health bar. Also you have these expiring times and it’s very cool – modern MUD. 41:22 – Eric. 42:00 – Panel: You came from a Ruby background – what was your transition to Elixir like for you? How did you come to Elixir? What was that like for you? 42:15 – Eric: Yeah some of my friends were into Elixir from a functional standpoint about 2 years ago. They were reading about Phoenix and such. They wanted to see how it was going to go. 43:06 – Panel: Try by fire. Coming from Ruby to Elixir – what some advice would you give the same person? 43:37 – Eric: It was less of a culture shock b/c Phoenix was still kind of “Railsy.” 44:35 – Panel: When I was first learning ERLANG, and telling them that it was a standard library. 44:59 – Eric: It’s using Cowboys Ranch. 45:19 – Eric: There are a number of people out there that they want people to run to SSH b/c it’s more secure. 45:46 – Eric: I guess if we are on this topic about secure... 46:40 – Chuck. 46:51 – Panel: I think there is a lot of value, Eric, and the lessons you’ve learned and the path you’ve gone down. If you are new to Elixir going to ExVenture is a great way to start. 47:20 – Eric. 47:35 – Panel: Just run the format and we can do it that way. I encourage people to download it and see what it’s like as a user, and play with it as an admin. We have a Meetup coming up this Thursday. Eric is coming in virtually into our Meetup group. 48:29 – Eric: Gossip is open source. Grapevine and Raisin – check these out, too, b/c they are open source, too. 48:58 – Panel: Where can people contact you? 49:05 – Eric: Twitter! GitHub! Mudcoders.com. 49:39 – Picks! 49:44 – Ad: Lootcrate.com Links: Ruby Elixir Elm Atom.io Flutter.io JavaScript Visual Studio Code React Erlang ExVenture Ex_Venture ExVenture’s Trello Board Prometheus Prometheus EX Gossip GitHub: Gossip 2018 – Conference Talk @ Elixir Conf with Eric Oestrich Eric’s Blog Libcluster Raft – GitHub.io – The Raft Consensus Algorithm pg2 MidMUD Gossip/Haus/Docs ExVenture: Docker Environment Google: Text Adventure Achaea Cowboy SSH Grapevine Raisin ASDF Plugins Eric’s GitHub Eric’s Twitter Brooklyn Nine-Nine Elm Packages MetaBase Sponsors: Loot Crate Get a Coder Job! Fresh Books Cache Fly Picks: Eric MUD Coders Elixir LS Mark ASDF Library Josh Brooklyn Nine-Nine Elm UI Nate Mentoring and Paired Programming Metabase Charles Monster Hunters International

Panel: Mark Ericksen Josh Adams Nate Hopkins Charles Max Wood Special Guest: Eric Oestrich In this episode of Elixir Mix, the panel talks with Eric Oestrich who is a web developer who resides in Indianapolis, Indiana. He and the panel talk about ExVenture, Gossip, Cowboy, Raisin, Grapevine, and much more! Listen to today’s episode to hear all about it! Finally, check out Eric’s ElixirConf talk and his blog, too! Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job!  0:51 – Charles introduces the panel. 1:14 – Nate talks about his background. 1:27 – Chuck: My first programming job I worked with Nate. Nate also works now with Eric Berry. We have a special guest and that is Eric Oestrich. Tell us who you are, please! 1:55 – Eric: I work for Smart Logic, LLC. We are a consultancy who has moved to Elixir for the last 2 years. 2:14 – Chuck: Tell us what ExVenture is? 2:46 – Eric: Late 80’s to mid-90’s it’s like a MUD tech space game. Eric goes into detail of what ExVenture is. 3:28 – Panel: Familiar with MUDS. 3:36 – Panel: Audience can’t tell that Eric isn’t an old guy. Eric – you aren’t an old gentleman – how did you get into it?! 4:02 – Eric: The concept has fascinated me. It’s pure game mechanics. In school I wrote things in Python and try to make it threaded. Never got it going. After that I wanted to do a MUD but not good enough in C and couldn’t get it working in Ruby neither. But one faithful day (a year ago) I got an echo and chat server and now we have a MUD. 5:02 – Panel: Why should you be interested? I will tell you why. ExVenture is an open source... I encourage everyone to dig into and play with it! It is a game (so that makes it more fun) but you are dealing with game mechanics. I am also curious where you wanted this to go? What made you say: I want to create this and make it open source? 6:37 – Eric: I like it and work has mostly played for it. It’s MIT because of that. Early in the project (between client work) it was a common thread and that’s why it’s open source. 7:27 – Panel: I ran into you at the conference and you were showing me... Talk about getting metrics out of your system, please? 8:20 – Eric answers the question. 9:09 – Panel: When people are trying to get metrics out of their system – what EVEN makes a good metric? 9:21- Eric: I am trying to figure that out myself, actually. I want to know how long it takes for someone to login? Is that someone trying to hack into my system? If you speak at a global channel or something else... Eric goes into more detail. Eric also mentions Prometheus. 10:31 – Panel: You mentioned: What would you want to see on a dashboard? 11:01 – Eric answers the question and mentions Prometheus EX. 12:19 – Panel: As you starting building this you were pulling libraries out of it and making them separate libraries. Are you pretty proud of GOSSIP? 12:37 – Eric: Yes! Gossip is based on web sockets and it’s a cowboy socket. Eric talks about Gossip. 13:10 – Panel: What other clients are you trying to support? 13:15 – Eric: There is a JavaScript client and Node-based game called... There is a bundle system for that. There is also a Python option. The one thing we haven’t done yet is a C client. That is important b/c most of the games that you could connect to are 25-30 years old. 14:26 – Panel asks a question. 14:34 – Eric: That is the C client we are waiting for. 14:43 – Panel: You talked at the conference (see the show notes) you talked about things you learned along the way. Can you talk about your process? What kind of bottlenecks and how did you resolve those issues? 15:10 – Eric answers the question. 16:44 – Panel: Did you run out of processes? 16:47 – Eric: The VM shut-off – it was just done. That was the first go-around. 19:27 – Eric: After the ElixirConf, I wanted to see how far I could push it. Eric continues. 19:51 – Panel: I want to identify some of these principles you just talked about. First, the major block was the gen server is a single process. 20:21 – Panel. 20:24 – Panel: I think that is a common mistake when people come to Elixir in the beginning stages. How did you solve it? 20:50 – Panelist answers the above question. 21:30 – Panel: That’s one of the big things. It’s an architectural issue. Second, you mentioned really LARGE messages. You were sending around really large messages. 22:20 – Eric: For every 100 players was a gigabyte of ram – it was a lot. And that was mostly b/c every copy...when a new character enters the room then that message gets sent out then it gets copied again, and... 23:08 – Panel. 23:24 – Panel: The third one you mentioned was around data base blocking or...? Can you talk about this one a little more, please? 23:33 – Eric answers the question. 24:02 – Panel. 24:30 – Eric: It was always saving...I tricked Echo into saving...There is a lot of things that could be better to save specifically faster. 24:52 – Panel: I think people would hit those 3 points eventually – there is a lot of value to that. 25:09 –Eric: Yes that was near the end of my ElixirConf talk and my blog. 25:23 – Panel. 25:33 – Eric: It came out in May and I figured out that I needed to learn how to cluster in Elixir. That’s what the ElixirConf was a bout from single node to multiple nodes. Eric continues. 28:38 – Panel: When you have a cluster – and I join – when I transfer from one room to another room, I could be passed off to another server or node? 29:01 – Eric: Whatever you mean by “being passed off.” Whatever server you land on that’s the one you will be on. The magic is that... 30:08 – Advertisement: Fresh Books! 31:15 – Panel: I am going through the code base now and I am excited. It’s going to help me get better at Elixir. 31:32 – Eric: That’s the point of ExVenture. 31:48 – Panel: You host a server so people can see what it’s about – and that’s Mid Mud, right? 32:09 – Eric: Yep, the first hour of you playing. There is a town crier, you request, and then combat monsters. Also, it is plugged into Gossip and you can talk to them. 32:44 – Eric: Yep, there you go: player logged-in! 32:55 – Panel: Maybe not b/c it will turn into a new podcast soon. 33:07 – Panel: What if I want to use Gossip, what is involved there? 33:16 – Eric: Gossip.Haus/docs – Go there! Set it up and start sending and receiving events. 34:40 – Panel: When I was trying to understand the Prometheus metrics it helped. And then in downloading it (as a tip), for me, it was easy to use the DOCKER instructions. 35:32 – Eric: Yep, that was done by a community member. 35:40 – Panel: Are you looking for people to contribute? 35:50 – Eric: Yep, I have a public Trello board. There are 2 tags. 36:12 – Panel: Sounds like you have people involved? 36:22 – Eric: Bunch of people came on after the ElixirConf. 36:33 – Panel: If people download it (another tip) in the SEEDS file you will find out the admin username and password. I guess that’s something you can add. Login: ADMIN and Password: PASSWORD. What I thought was fun (playing with it) in the admin screen I got a sense that it’s generic enough that I could create a space game. Like playing with sectors of space. Does that make sense? 37:42 – Eric: I don’t want it to be tied JUST to fantasy b/c that’s what MUD is. Everything should be good for historical/ fantasy/ etc. any genre that you want to do! 38:13 – Panel: I could see a HackFest and the company could create one for their business. You could have a lot of fun with it. 38:38 – Panel. 38:44 – Panel: Hidden things on their websites. 38:50 – Eric: Search TEXT ADVENTURE in Google Search. See show notes below. 39:24 – Panel: There is a whole subculture that people are interested in and I didn’t know that these people existed. I think that is interesting. 39:45 – Eric: There are tons of games out there that are 20+ years old! 39:55 – Panel: What is your favorite old school MUD game? 40:02 – Eric lists his favorite old school games! One of them is Achaea! 40:51 – Panel: I like the status bars are really cool. If you haven’t played it you have a health bar. Also you have these expiring times and it’s very cool – modern MUD. 41:22 – Eric. 42:00 – Panel: You came from a Ruby background – what was your transition to Elixir like for you? How did you come to Elixir? What was that like for you? 42:15 – Eric: Yeah some of my friends were into Elixir from a functional standpoint about 2 years ago. They were reading about Phoenix and such. They wanted to see how it was going to go. 43:06 – Panel: Try by fire. Coming from Ruby to Elixir – what some advice would you give the same person? 43:37 – Eric: It was less of a culture shock b/c Phoenix was still kind of “Railsy.” 44:35 – Panel: When I was first learning ERLANG, and telling them that it was a standard library. 44:59 – Eric: It’s using Cowboys Ranch. 45:19 – Eric: There are a number of people out there that they want people to run to SSH b/c it’s more secure. 45:46 – Eric: I guess if we are on this topic about secure... 46:40 – Chuck. 46:51 – Panel: I think there is a lot of value, Eric, and the lessons you’ve learned and the path you’ve gone down. If you are new to Elixir going to ExVenture is a great way to start. 47:20 – Eric. 47:35 – Panel: Just run the format and we can do it that way. I encourage people to download it and see what it’s like as a user, and play with it as an admin. We have a Meetup coming up this Thursday. Eric is coming in virtually into our Meetup group. 48:29 – Eric: Gossip is open source. Grapevine and Raisin – check these out, too, b/c they are open source, too. 48:58 – Panel: Where can people contact you? 49:05 – Eric: Twitter! GitHub! Mudcoders.com. 49:39 – Picks! 49:44 – Ad: Lootcrate.com Links: Ruby Elixir Elm Atom.io Flutter.io JavaScript Visual Studio Code React Erlang ExVenture Ex_Venture ExVenture’s Trello Board Prometheus Prometheus EX Gossip GitHub: Gossip 2018 – Conference Talk @ Elixir Conf with Eric Oestrich Eric’s Blog Libcluster Raft – GitHub.io – The Raft Consensus Algorithm pg2 MidMUD Gossip/Haus/Docs ExVenture: Docker Environment Google: Text Adventure Achaea Cowboy SSH Grapevine Raisin ASDF Plugins Eric’s GitHub Eric’s Twitter Brooklyn Nine-Nine Elm Packages MetaBase Sponsors: Loot Crate Get a Coder Job! Fresh Books Cache Fly Picks: Eric MUD Coders Elixir LS Mark ASDF Library Josh Brooklyn Nine-Nine Elm UI Nate Mentoring and Paired Programming Metabase Charles Monster Hunters International

** SHOW NOTES ** * https://github.com/ElixirTalk/elixirtalk/issues/44 * https://github.com/akoutmos/pharams * https://github.com/vic/params * https://github.com/jonasschmidt/ex_json_schema * https://github.com/bitwalker/libcluster * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2_MUD16EIk

== Show Notes == - EMPEX (http://empex.co/) - Crevalle (http://crevalle.io/) - Frame.io (https://frame.io) - Distillery (https://github.com/bitwalker/distillery) - Bottling Elixir with Docker (https://paullamb.exposed/blog/2017/1/11/bottling-elixir-with-docker-part-1) - CircleCI (https://circleci.com/) - edeliver (https://github.com/edeliver/edeliver) - Runtime Configuration (https://github.com/bitwalker/distillery/blob/master/docs/Runtime%20Configuration.md) - Mix Docker (https://github.com/Recruitee/mix_docker) - Desmond’s Deploy Script (https://gist.github.com/desmondmonster/2384ac4464e9a857f8b9d44d0d906df9) - Real World Elixir Deployment - (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H686MDn4Lo8) - The Future of Deployment (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fuUtQFinZk) - Gigalixir (https://www.gigalixir.com/) - Deploying Phoenix on Heroku (https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/heroku.html) - LibCluster (https://github.com/bitwalker/libcluster) - Desmond on Twitter (http://twitter.com/desmondmonster) - Chris on Twitter (http://twitter.com/cjbell_) Ask us a Question at https://github.com/elixirtalk/elixirtalk Follow us on Twitter! @elixirtalk