Building binary protocol drivers in Elixir

Abstract

LiveHelpNow, a support service company, uses a VB.NET/WebForms-oriented stack, which is further becoming more difficult to maintain. After an extended research period, the company settled on migrating to Elixir/Erlang as a long-term goal. At the time, Elixir was still in its infancy, but the developers felt Erlang was a great match for the nature of their service, despite what was considered to be poor support for communicating with Microsoft SQL Server, and despite having little development experience in a functional paradigm. They felt the benefits of Elixir/Erlang outweighed the costs of developing a new database driver. In this talk, Justin will discuss his experience building a binary protocol driver to the Tabular Data Stream(TDS) specification in Elixir and, more generally, on using Elixir in production.

Justin Schneck

Justin Schneck is a leading software engineer at LiveHelpNow in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He spends his time as a Linux administrator while also programming in Elixir, Erlang, and Ruby. Justin actively contributes to Elixir and to the community on many open source projects. In his spare time, he creates custom hardware and continues to develop Metasphere, a framework for building and distributing embedded software in Elixir and Erlang.