Interview with Zach Daniel

In this interview with Zach Daniel, an Elixir enthusiast and maintainer of the Datadog Elixir APM (Tracing) library known as Spandex, he discusses his journey into Elixir, the development process for Spandex, and how he got other people on board with the project. Zach shares that he initially switched to Elixir due to its high-quality tools like Ecto and Phoenix, which were perfect for their needs at Albert.io. He also talks about the challenges faced during the development of Spandex, such as managing state without clogging up the works and ensuring that the monitoring tool never fails or causes the application to fail. Zach used a mix of looking at other code and trial-and-error to figure out how to use Datadog's features in his library. He also mentions the importance of maintaining open source projects like Spandex, which has received significant interest from developers using it in their production applications.