Elixir Mentor

Thomas Athanas, Head of Engineering at LevelAll, joins me on the Elixir Mentor Podcast to talk through the infrastructure, architectural, and leadership decisions that come with building systems you actually own — and what happens when vendor lock-in catches up with you in production.
Thomas walks through LevelAll's move away from Fly and Gigalixir toward bare metal hardware, the thundering herd problem that comes with serving 50,000 concurrent education users, and why they made the call to remove both Phoenix LiveView and Ash framework from production. We get into Ash APS premium support, JSONB query challenges, and the tradeoffs of leaning on a framework when hiring for it is hard.
We talk about using AI as a development planning tool and context keeper for managers — including Thomas's "Lore Master" concept, where AI agents preserve institutional knowledge so it never walks out the door. From there we get into the Auth0 rate limiting incident that hit during a live onboarding, the FusionAuth migration that followed, enterprise auth requirements like OIDC and SAML, and the bcrypt hash conversion work that made it all possible. Thomas also shares his work on a custom Erlang-based bare metal deployment agent and his approach to Postgres configuration and backups with pgBackRest.
The second half covers founder mode mentality, total ownership of problems, the player-coach leadership style, Sanity CMS vendor lock-in, building an audience vs. building a customer base, and practical advice for technical founders who keep procrastinating with features instead of making sales.
Connect with Thomas:
- X/Twitter: https://x.com/ThomasAthanas
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomasathanas/
Sponsors:
- BEAMOps: https://beamops.co.uk
- Paraxial.io: https://paraxial.io
- Jido: https://agentjido.xyz/discord
SUPPORT ELIXIR MENTOR
- Elixir Mentor: https://elixirmentor.com/?utm_source=elixir-mentor

In this episode of the Elixir Mentor Podcast, I sit down with Amos King, Senior Staff Backend Engineer at Adobe, founder of Binary Noggin, and longtime Elixir community contributor. We dig into mentorship, knowledge sharing, and the team dynamics that make software organizations actually thrive.
Amos traces his non-traditional path into software — from structural engineering to manufacturing automation to Erlang on Navy submarines — and explains how that background shapes how he thinks about building reliable systems. We talk about his decade running Binary Noggin, why he ultimately made the move to Adobe, and the hard lessons learned when the consulting market shifted. From there the conversation goes deep on team composition, why diverse backgrounds matter more than uniform credentials, and the mindset shift from object-oriented to functional programming.
We also get into the practical side of Elixir: when GenServers are the right tool and when they're not, why vibe coding worries him from an engineering quality standpoint, and why teaching is actually a selfish act that benefits the teacher most. We close out with what separates a real staff engineer from a senior one, a call for the Elixir community to revive local meetups, and a real-world database query optimization story that reframes how to think about performance problems.
Resources Mentioned:
- Binary Noggin: https://binarynoggin.com
Connect with Amos:
- X/Twitter: https://x.com/Adkron
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amosking/
SPONSORS
- BEAMOps: https://beamops.co.uk
- Paraxial.io: https://paraxial.io
- Jido: https://agentjido.xyz/discord
SUPPORT ELIXIR MENTOR
- Elixir Mentor: https://elixirmentor.com

In this episode of the Elixir Mentor Podcast, I chat with Dave Lucia, CTO and Co-Founder of TV Labs. Dave returns to the podcast to talk about building an AI-powered smart TV testing platform that lets media companies test streaming apps on hundreds of real physical devices through the cloud — all built primarily in Elixir.
Dave walks through the founding of TV Labs, from meeting his co-founder at Bloomberg over a decade ago to building an MVP with WebRTC during the pandemic. He covers the technical challenges of managing a massive device lab — procurement, warm-up processes, security isolation, session management, and keeping hundreds of TVs, Rokus, Fire TVs, and Apple TVs healthy and available for enterprise clients. The platform uses a custom KQL query engine for real-time device matching and a licensing system built on Elixir GenServers sharded across the cluster.
We get into Dave's 10-year history with Elixir in production, starting at Bloomberg and carrying through to TV Labs. He explains why Elixir was the right fit for orchestrating physical devices at scale, from its standard library minimizing dependencies to building Apple device communication libraries and even a Lua 5.3 interpreter directly in Elixir. Dave also shares how TV Labs uses OpenTelemetry for observability and runs multi-region infrastructure with session recording capabilities.
The conversation shifts to AI, where Dave describes using Claude and other LLMs to accelerate development, automate operations like vendor management and support emails, and build AI agents for QA testing. We wrap up with a candid discussion on whether AI will replace developers and how these tools are fundamentally changing what's possible for small teams.
Connect with Dave:
- Website: https://davelucia.com
- X/Twitter: https://x.com/davydog187
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-lucia-a395441b/
Sponsors:
- BEAMOps: https://beamops.co.uk
- Paraxial.io: https://paraxial.io
- Jido: https://agentjido.xyz/discord
SUPPORT ELIXIR MENTOR
- Elixir Mentor: https://elixirmentor.com

In this episode of the Elixir Mentor Podcast, I chat with Rob Walling — serial entrepreneur, author of The SaaS Playbook, founder of MicroConf, co-founder of TinySeed, and the guy who bootstrapped Drip to a successful exit. With over 20 years of experience and investments in 230+ B2B SaaS companies, Rob shares the playbook for building software businesses without venture capital.
Rob breaks down his stairstep method of entrepreneurship, explaining why technical founders should start with small wins on existing marketplaces before attempting a standalone SaaS product. We get into the common traps developers fall into — refusing to learn marketing, building products that "sell themselves," and bootstrapping two-sided marketplaces without an existing audience. Rob also shares the full Drip origin story, from a plateauing email tool to a marketing automation platform that took off after listening to customer feedback.
We cover the four core SaaS skills every founding team needs (marketing or sales, product, and engineering), how to decide between finding a co-founder and learning to sell on your own, and where successful SaaS ideas actually come from — 72% were discovered at a day job. Rob also weighs in on how AI is reshaping the SaaS landscape, why he doesn't believe in a "SaaS apocalypse," and what really drives company valuations. His final advice for technical founders: think in years, not months, and invest in learning entrepreneurship the same way you invested in learning to code.
Resources Mentioned:
- The SaaS Playbook: https://saasplaybook.com
- MicroConf: https://microconf.com
- TinySeed: https://tinyseed.com
Connect with Rob:
- Website: https://robwalling.com
- X/Twitter: https://x.com/robwalling
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robwalling
- Podcast: https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com
Sponsors:
- Paraxial.io: https://paraxial.io
- Jido: https://agentjido.xyz/discord
SUPPORT ELIXIR MENTOR
- Elixir Mentor: https://elixirmentor.com

In this episode of the Elixir Mentor Podcast, I chat with Jamil Bou Kheir, founder of Firezone, a YC-backed open-source zero-trust access platform. Jamil shares his journey from eight years as a Cisco security engineer to building an enterprise VPN replacement using Elixir and Rust.
We explore how Firezone started as a simple WireGuard configuration tool that hit the front page of Hacker News, then evolved into a full zero-trust platform. Jamil explains the architecture decisions behind using Elixir for the control plane and Rust for the data plane, including their custom ICE implementation called Snownet for NAT traversal. The conversation covers practical insights on Phoenix PubSub for real-time signaling, Postgres WAL streaming for change data capture, and running a global Erlang cluster.
Jamil also shares candid advice from the Y Combinator experience, discussing funding, product-market fit, and the challenges of rebuilding a product architecture mid-startup. We dive into the realities of open source licensing, security through transparency, and SOC 2 compliance. The episode touches on AI in development workflows, managing large refactors, and marketing strategies for technical founders.
Whether you're interested in networking protocols, building with Elixir at scale, or the startup journey from side project to funded company, this conversation offers valuable perspective from someone doing it in production.
Resources Mentioned:
- Firezone: https://www.firezone.dev
- WireGuard: https://www.wireguard.com
- Github: https://github.com/firezone/firezone
Connect with Jamil:
- Website: https://www.firezone.dev
- X/Twitter: https://x.com/jamilbk
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamilbk/
- GitHub: https://github.com/jamilbk
Sponsors:
- Paraxial.io: https://paraxial.io
- Jido: https://agentjido.xyz/discord
SUPPORT ELIXIR MENTOR
- Elixir Mentor: https://elixirmentor.com