Frank McGeough

I am an Elixir software developer. I’ve been using Elixir for projects at various companies since 2016.

I’ve worked in software engineering long enough to have experienced a variety of languages and tools. I’ve worked directly with hardware and embedded systems via “C” then “C++”. Built enterprise software with “Java” and “Python”. Used “Ruby” for various utility things (as well as helping friends that had Rails issues and working on Rails code at a couple of companies). Built robust web apps and API’s with both “Java” and “Elixir”.

I’m always looking for new things to learn in programming - both in low-level details and in how to get teams of people to work cooperatively to produce great software.

Teaching

Helping people learn makes me happy.

I spend time trying to develop Elixir code that can help developers learn the language and some fundamental libraries. Here’s a couple of examples.

• brod_mimic - the main means of interacting with Kafka for most Elixir developers is the brod library. This library is written in Erlang. It can be a daunting task for developers new to Elixir to also take on learning Erlang as well. This project was developed to do a “port” of brod to Elixir. This allows developers to see how things are expressed in Erlang vs Elixir.

• Elixir Supervision. One of the more interesting aspects of Elixir (Erlang) is the actor model implementation and the principle of “let it crash”. There are simple but powerful constructs in the language that allow a developer to easily build a supervision tree so that processes are restarted if (when) they crash. But most Elixir developers struggle with understanding the mechanics. This repo is sample Elixir code meant to demonstrate some aspects of Elixir Supervision.

Other

I like music. I learned how to play guitar (not so badly) and I play electric, acoustic and resonator guitars.

I enjoy cooking. Although I’ll dive into cookbooks I mostly just improvise with what we have on-hand.

I enjoy reading. A lot. I’ve been averaging reading over 100 books a year for quite a while. I like fiction and non-fiction. If I find an author I like I will generally go through all the author’s books.

Contact me

Contact links appear below.