Building on the BEAM: Exploring Erlang and Elixir, Part 2 with Shawn McCool

We continue our exploration of Erlang and Elixir with Shawn McCool, diving deep into the Elixir ecosystem and its powerful tools and frameworks. From Phoenix’s revolutionary LiveView approach to Ecto’s composable database queries, we examine how Elixir’s design enables building sophisticated systems with less complexity.

Shawn shares practical examples from his experience, including building home automation systems with Nerves for monitoring energy usage. We explore LiveBook’s potential for executable documentation and collaborative development, and dive into how Tidewave enables AI agents to interact with running Elixir applications. The conversation also covers when to leverage built-in BEAM capabilities versus external services, and how this gradual scaling approach simplifies early development while maintaining flexibility for growth.

Topics include:

Phoenix Framework and its real-time capabilities through LiveView
Ecto’s approach to database access and why it’s not a traditional ORM
When to use built-in capabilities vs external services (ETS vs Redis, Phoenix PubSub vs RabbitMQ)
Nerves for embedded development and IoT applications
Numerical Elixir (Nx) for ML and numerical computing
LiveBook for collaborative development and executable documentation
Tidewave and AI integration with Elixir applications
Domain modeling with functional programming principles
Learning strategies: Erlang first vs jumping into Elixir

We wrap up by exploring the paradigm shift from object-oriented to functional programming, with Shawn sharing his recommended learning path including books from the Pragmatic Bookshelf.

This is Part 2 of a 2-part series. In Part 1 , we explored the BEAM virtual machine, the actor model, and how Erlang’s unique approach to concurrency enables building more resilient systems.

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