Jerod gathers a group of friends for our first game show experiment here on Changelog & Friends! This is a game of obscure jargon, fake definitions & expert tomfoolery. Our contestants checked their imposter syndrome at the door, because they either know what these words mean or they fake it ’til they make their peers think they do.

Lars is big on Elixir. Think apps that scale really well, tend to be monolithic, and have one of the most mature deployment models: self-contained releases & built-in hot code reloading. In episode 7, Gerhard talked to Lars about “Why Kubernetes”. There is a follow-up YouTube stream that showed how to automate deploys for an Elixir app using K3s & ArgoCD.

More than a year later, how does Lars think about running applications in production? What does simple & straightforward mean to him? Gerhard’s favourite: what is “human scale deployments”?

This week we turn the mics on ourselves, kind of. Lars Wikman joins the show to give us a guided tour through ID3 esoterica and the shiny new open source Elixir library he developed for us. We talk about what ID3 is, its many versions, what it aims to be and what it could have been, how our library project got started, all the unique features and failed dreams of the ID3v2 spec, how ID3v2 and Podcasting 2.0 are solving the problem differently, and how all of this maps back to us giving you (our listeners) a better experience while listening to our shows.

In today’s Kaizen episode, we talk about shipping Adam’s Christmas present: chapter support for all Changelog episodes that we now publish. This feature was hard because there are many subtle differences in how the ID3 spec is implemented. Of course, once the PR shipped, there were other issues to solve, including an upgrade the world kind of scenario. Since Lars Wikman did all the heavy ID3 lifting, he joins us in this episode.

This week on Ship It! Gerhard talks with Lars Wikman (independent Elixir/BEAM software consultant) why sometimes a monolith running on a single host with continuous backups and a built-in self-restore capability is everything that a small team of developers needs. That’s right, no Kubernetes or microservices. After 2 years of running changelog.com, a Phoenix monolith, on Kubernetes, what do I think? Join our discuss and find out!