Elm Town 72 – 435 million reasons to love Elm + Elixir with Erik Person

Elm Town

Erik Person shares how he joined Corvus Insurance as the first engineer building the system from scratch with Elm and Elixir. We talk about onboarding, culture, and growing the team. He exclaims his excitement for the next phase of acquisition by Travelers.

Thanks to our sponsor, Logistically. Email: [e-mail].

Music by Jesse Moore.

Recording date: 2023.12.05

Guest

• Erik Person

Show notes

[00:00:22] Sponsored by Logistically

[00:00:52] Introducing Erik

• Elm seeds
• Travelers to Acquire Corvus Insurance

[00:01:20] Getting started

[00:07:27] The flight to Elm

[00:12:43] Elm seeds

[00:17:14] Why Elm at Corvus?

• "The Python Paradox" by Paul Graham
• "Make Impossible States Impossible" by Richard Feldman

[00:21:57] Hiring & onboarding practices

[00:24:09] Scaling

• Aaron VonderHaar's elm-format

[00:27:49] Static Elm + dynamic Elixir

• Luke Westby's elm-http-builder

[00:34:32] Programming the plane

[00:38:58] Corvus engineering culture

• Forbes' list of "America’s Best Startup Employers"

[00:43:59] Acquisition

• Travelers to Acquire Corvus Insurance
• Travelers Completes Acquisition of Corvus Insurance

[00:48:34] Picks

Erik's picks

• "Interesting bugs caught by no-constant-binary-expression" by Jordan Eldredge
• "Training AI to Play Pokemon with Reinforcement Learning" by Peter Whidden
• The Data Warehouse Toolkit by Ralph Kimball and Margy Ross

Jared's pick

• Jeroen Engels' elm-review