In this episode of Elixir Wizards, host Sundi Myint chats with SmartLogic engineers and fellow Wizards Dan Ivovich and Charles Suggs about the practical tooling that surrounds Elixir in a consultancy setting. We dig into how standardized dev environments, sensible scaffolding, and clear observability help teams ship quickly across many client projects without turning every app into a snowflake. Join us for a grounded tour of what’s working for us today (and what we’ve retired), plus how we evaluate new tech (including AI) through a pragmatic, Elixir-first lens.

Key topics discussed in this episode:

• Standardizing across projects: why consistent environments matter in consultancy work


• Nix (and flakes) for reproducible dev setups and faster onboarding


• Igniter to scaffold common patterns (auth, config, workflows) without boilerplate drift


• Deployment approaches: OTP releases, runtime config, and Ansible playbooks


• Frontend pipeline evolution: from Brunch/Webpack to esbuild + Tailwind


• Observability in practice: Prometheus metrics and Grafana dashboards


• Handling time-series and sensor data


• When Explorer can be the database


• Picking the right tool: Elixir where it shines, integrations where it counts


• Using AI with intention: code exploration, prototypes, and guardrails for IP/security


• Keeping quality high across multiple codebases: tests, telemetry, and sensible conventions


• Reducing context-switching costs with shared patterns and playbooks

Links mentioned:

http://smartlogic.io

https://nix.dev/

https://github.com/ash-project/igniter

Elixir Wizards S13E01 Igniter with Zach Daniel https://youtu.be/WM9iQlQSF_g

https://github.com/elixir-explorer/explorer

Elixir Wizards S14E09 Explorer with Chris Grainger https://youtu.be/OqJDsCF0El0

Elixir Wizards S14E08 Nix with Norbert (Nobbz) Melzer https://youtu.be/yymUcgy4OAk

https://jqlang.org/

https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep

https://github.com/resources/articles/devops/ci-cd

https://prometheus.io/

https://capistranorb.com/

https://ansible.com/ 

https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/releases.html

https://brunch.io/

https://webpack.js.org/loaders/css-loader/

https://tailwindcss.com/

https://sass-lang.com/dart-sass/

https://grafana.com/

https://pragprog.com/titles/passweather/build-a-weather-station-with-elixir-and-nerves/

https://www.datadoghq.com/

https://sqlite.org/

Elixir Wizards S14E06 SDUI at Cars.com with Zack Kayser https://youtu.be/nloRcgngT_k

https://github.com/features/copilot

https://openai.com/codex/

https://www.anthropic.com/claude-code

YouTube Video: Vibe Coding TEDCO's RFP https://youtu.be/i1ncgXZJHZs

Blog: https://smartlogic.io/blog/how-i-used-ai-to-vibe-code-a-website-called-for-in-tedco-rfp/

Blog: https://smartlogic.io/blog/from-vibe-to-viable-turning-ai-built-prototypes-into-market-ready-mvps/

https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/eragon-by-christopher-paolini/246801

https://tidewave.ai/

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