Dave Lucia on Observability at Bitfo

Elixir Wizards

Welcome to our first episode of Season 9 Elixir Wizards, Parsing the Particulars. A show focused on conversations with software developers from around the world on the Elixir language and other modern web technologies. Today, we are joined by Dave Lucia, Chief Technology Officer at Bitfo, a cryptocurrency media company building educational content for people who are interested in cryptocurrency. Dave is active in the Elixir community and in the past has spoken at Code BEAM SF, ElixirConf, RabbitMQ Summit, and has written several blog posts which can be found at davelucia.com. In today’s episode we find out more about Dave’s professional background and dive into the particulars of observability. Tune in today to learn more from today’s special guest, Dave Lucia!

Key Points From This Episode:

• A brief breakdown of today’s topic and introduction to our special guest, Dave Lucia
• We find out about Bitfo and what services they offer
• We discuss Dave’s blog post on observability
• Find out how Dave wrote the blog post because he saw a gap at his company
• How Sundi proofread Dave’s blog post and realized her lack of knowledge on observability
• The most common mistake teams or engineers make when it comes to observability
• We peel back the layers on what telemetry is
• What the difference between telemetry and OpenTelemetry is
• How to choose which tool is right when it comes to better observability *The breakdown of the uses for observability telemetry *When and why would we use OpenTelemtry vs basic observability *What languages Dave started in before he was working in Elixir *How Elixir lends better for observability *Where to start if you want to implement basic observability for someone who has no experience with it *Dave answers the question, “can you go too far with observability?” *We discuss Livebook and what exciting things it will bring for the future *Most importantly, Dave explains why pineapples are important to him

**Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

• Dave’s blog post on Observability: https://davelucia.com/blog/observing-elixir-with-lightstep
• Dave Lucia on Twitter — https://twitter.com/davydog187
• Dave Lucia on GitHub — https://github.com/davydog187
• Dave Lucia on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-lucia-a395441b/
• Bitfo — https://www.bitfo.com/
• SmartLogic — https://smartlogic.io/

Links:

• Spotify