BEAM There, Done That
Plangora
BEAM There, Done That is a podcast about building real systems with Elixir, Erlang, and the BEAM.
We’ve built it before — distributed systems, fault‑tolerant services, event pipelines, real‑time apps, production nightmares, and the supervision trees that saved them.
Each episode dives into practical lessons from shipping software on the BEAM: architecture decisions, scaling challenges, operational failures, and the patterns that actually work.
No hype. No theory without scars. Just hard‑won experience from engineers who’ve been there.
We’ve built it before — distributed systems, fault‑tolerant services, event pipelines, real‑time apps, production nightmares, and the supervision trees that saved them.
Each episode dives into practical lessons from shipping software on the BEAM: architecture decisions, scaling challenges, operational failures, and the patterns that actually work.
No hype. No theory without scars. Just hard‑won experience from engineers who’ve been there.
Episodes
Mentioned books
14 snips
Mar 27, 2026 • 51min
The Ash Framework: Rationale, Design, and Adoption — with Zach Daniel
Zach Daniel, creator of the Ash Framework and VP of Engineering at RemedyMeds, talks about why he built Ash and how it models applications as declarative resources. He explores constraints that boost productivity, comparison to OTP principles, adoption challenges, Ash’s TypeScript angle, AI and policy integration, and practical patterns for real-world apps.
10 snips
Mar 20, 2026 • 35min
Efficiency Gap: Why Elixir Outruns AI Coding Agents
Jose Valim, creator of Elixir and active open-source maintainer, discusses why Elixir is well suited for AI coding agents. He talks about immutability and isolated state, centralized documentation like HexDocs, and agent-friendly tooling. He also covers designing for humans to help agents, Elixir 2.0 tradeoffs, and his work on types and a web-focused coding agent called Tidewave.
10 snips
Mar 13, 2026 • 37min
Numerical Elixir and Machine Learning with Paulo Valente
Paulo Valente, maintainer of NX and Elixir gRPC library and platform engineer at TV Labs with eight years of Elixir experience. He walks through the NX ecosystem and how defn/backends compile to CPU, GPU, or WebAssembly. They compare when to use NX versus Python, explore zero-copy Python and GPU interop, and outline NX 1.0 goals, versioning, and getting started resources.
19 snips
Feb 27, 2026 • 51min
Concurrency, OTP, and the Evolution of the BEAM
Andrea Leopardi, platform engineer and Elixir core team member with a decade in Elixir and OSS, discusses concurrency, OTP and the BEAM evolution. They explore telecom roots of concurrency, how Elixir abstracts OTP, differences between Erlang and Elixir learning curves, BEAM strengths like isolated processes and distribution, and advanced concurrency topics Andrea will teach.
