EMx 022: “Adopting Elixir at Flatiron School and Pattern Matching” with Kate Travers

Panel: Charles Max WoodMark EricksenJosh Adams Special Guest: Kate Travers In this episode of Elixir Mix, the panel talks to Kate Travers who was a student/apprentice with the Flatiron School and now is on staff as a software engineer. The panel and Kate talk about adopting Elixir at the Flatiron School and Pattern Matching. Watch Kate’s talks about the topic; links to these talks can be found below. Show Topics: 1:08– Hi from Kate Travers. 1:16 – Chuck: Background? 2:20 – Kate gives her background. 2:30 – Chuck: We had another Flatiron alum from an extra show. 2:44 – Kate: Yeah – she’s great! 2:48 – Chuck: Flatiron mostly focused on Ruby and JavaScript. Has that changed or? 3:02 – Kate: For the students we are teaching the Rails focus on the backend and React on the frontend. Times might be changing. What else is out there for functional curriculum? Our lead engineer is super motivated introducing some Elixir. Our engineering team might be the first to go in that arena. It would be absolutely fantastic to 4:02 – Chuck: Awesome! I would like to see the boot camps take on Elixir. 4:15 – Kate: Yeah, there are many benefits of doing that. 4:57 – Chuck: You see some Reactive, some... It is interesting to see how it comes together and 5:16 – Kate: Yeah we see this as a support – delivery of curriculum. When you start out you are writing in a functional style. You are essentially writing TLI scripts – functional manner. Now in the curriculum we are training people to think, and to get away from that script-way, and think in terms of objects. 6:11 – Panelist: I think that is interesting. Some of the difficulty of teaching Elixir is to UNLEARN some of their past education. Start teaching people FUNCTIONAL, might help. 7:04 – Chuck: I have been starting a new project... What is going on here? Oh yeah I have to think about it. 7:20 – Kate: Yes. We have spun up – we have one core Elixir project. We have been on that for a year. We have spun up some smaller projects. On these projects this is the first time these people have used Elixir. It is interesting to see the difficulties that they are seeing for the first time. 8:09 – Chuck: I want to talk to adoption for a bit. So as your school has made this transition, where are you seeing the (first of all) where is it easy to get buy in. How did Elixir get into Flatiron? 9:06 – Kate: It is not apart of the school’s curriculum. How we started using Elixir was because our technical lead he is super loud / elegant voice for this language. Elixir might solve some of the problems that we were facing. When we adopt new tech it’s because we have thought about it heavily. We don’t adopt new technologies “just because”. The perfect opportunity came up, so this lead into why and how Flatiron started using Elixir. Kate goes into more detail. 15:24 – Chuck: Learn.io – check out outside of the school? 15:35 – Kate: Yep! There is even some interview prep; also, intro to Ruby, intro to JavaScript, and someday intro to Elixir? 16:06 – Chuck: As you brining people into this how do you transfer them to Ruby to Elixir? Do you throw them into the deep end? 16:26 – Kate: Sure! If someone...