Building on the BEAM: Exploring Erlang and Elixir, Part 1 with Shawn McCool

Chris Brousseau, co-author of LLMs in Production and VP of AI at Veox AI, joins us to peek under the hood of large language models. We explore the journey from linguistics to machine learning, what LLMs can and can't do with meaning, the gap between demos and production systems, and where agents and context engineering are heading.

Nick Tune, author of Architecture Modernization and Staff Engineer at Payfit, joins us to discuss the challenges and strategies of modernising legacy systems. We explore the four pillars of successful modernisation, socio-technical alignment, team topologies, domain modeling, and how AI tools like Claude Code are transforming architecture work.

Shawn McCool returns to discuss event sourcing in depth. We explore what event sourcing really means, how it differs from event-driven architectures, the relationship with CQRS and DDD, and practical strategies for building evolvable systems with short-lived aggregates.

David Boyne joins us to share his journey from AWS serverless advocate to solo bootstrapper building Event Catalog. We explore event-driven architecture governance challenges, the transition to full-time open source work, building for developers, and how AI is changing architecture documentation.

We continue our conversation with Shannon Wirtz, diving into ensemble methods, neural networks (including CNNs, RNNs, and Transformers), model training and evaluation techniques, interpretation methods, and practical learning resources for those getting started with ML.

Shannon Wirtz, product analyst at Angi, joins us to demystify machine learning fundamentals. We explore what ML actually means, how it differs from traditional programming, and dive deep into core concepts including models, features, training data, and the various types of learning approaches.

We continue our conversation with Shawn McCool, exploring the Elixir ecosystem including Phoenix's LiveView, Ecto's composable queries, Nerves for IoT, and LiveBook. We discuss when to use built-in BEAM capabilities versus external services, and dive into AI integration with Tidewave.

Shawn McCool shares his journey from class-oriented programming to discovering the power of Erlang and Elixir. We explore the BEAM virtual machine, process isolation, message passing, and how Erlang's unique approach to fault tolerance and concurrency enables building more resilient systems.

Bruce Momjian returns to complete our journey through a PostgreSQL table's lifecycle. We explore how Postgres handles updates, table alterations, row deletions, and table drops - diving deep into MVCC, vacuuming, and the Write-Ahead Log.

Bruce Momjian takes us on a deep dive into the lifecycle of a PostgreSQL table. We explore how tables are created, how data is inserted and stored, and how queries work - from physical storage and MVCC to constraints and query planning.