Steve Domin on Innovating Travel APIs

01/08/21 • 38 min

Anyone who has written software for the travel industry can tell you that it is in desperate need of innovation — shockingly many of their cobwebbed systems were built in the 70s. Today we speak with Duffel CEO Steve Domin, who is building tech that can finally align travel with the expectations of modern consumers. We open by exploring Steve’s journey into coding before diving into how Duffel is innovating travel. After touching on how the pandemic has impacted Duffel’s roll-out, Steve shares horror stories about the outdated tech and API systems that airlines use. We discuss Duffel’s service offerings and why Elixir is uniquely suited to solve the problems that Steve’s company is addressing. Steve then talks about the types of engineers that Duffel hires, his client base, and where his company is heading. Near the end of the episode, we ask Steve for his advice on selling your company on Elixir and we chat about the status of the London Elixir Meetup. Tune in for more insights on how Steve is using Elixir to make travel an effortless experience.

Key Points From This Episode:

Introducing Duffel CEO Steve Domin.
Steve shares details about his coding journey and career highlights.
Insights into the old school ecosystem of Flash, Flex, and ActionScript.
Exploring how Duffel is innovating the travel industry.
Why Duffel accelerated their roll-out due to the pandemic.
Steve unpacks the outdated tech and API systems that airlines use.
Why Duffel decided to use Elixir to tackle their problems.
The benefits of using Elixir when dealing with airline data.
Steve gives listeners an overview of Duffel’s pipeline.
Insights into the types of engineers that Duffel hires.
Who Duffel’s clients are and how they’re onboarded.
Steve reflects on some airline API horror stories.
Hear about Duffel’s roadmap — the future is bright.
What Elixir has uniquely enabled Duffel to do.
Steve’s advice on selling Elixir to stakeholders in your company.
The status of the London Elixir Meetup.

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

SmartLogic — https://smartlogic.io/
Steve Domin — https://stevedomin.com/about
Steve Domin on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevedomin/
Steve Domin on Twitter — https://twitter.com/stevedomin
Duffel — https://duffel.com/
Duffel Careers — https://duffel.com/careers
José Valim — https://twitter.com/josevalim
Flex — https://www.adobe.com/products/flex.html
Passenger Service System — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_service_system
Global Distribution System — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_distribution_system
Sabre — https://www.sabre.com/
Amadeus — https://amadeus.com/en
‘Why does NDC matter to my travel business?’ — https://duffel.com/blog/why-does-ndc-matter-to-my-travel-business
IATA — https://www.iata.org/
Next.js — https://nextjs.org/
GoCardless — https://gocardless.com/
Twilio — https://www.twilio.com/
Stripe — https://stripe.com/
Thomas Bates — https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-bates-3908a74b/
Elixir London Meetup — https://www.meetup.com/Elixir-London/
Baris Balic — https://twitter.com/barisbalic

Special Guest: Steve Domin.

Key Points From This Episode:

Introducing Duffel CEO Steve Domin.
Steve shares details about his coding journey and career highlights.
Insights into the old school ecosystem of Flash, Flex, and ActionScript.
Exploring how Duffel is innovating the travel industry.
Why Duffel accelerated their roll-out due to the pandemic.
Steve unpacks the outdated tech and API systems that airlines use.
Why Duffel decided to use Elixir to tackle their problems.
The benefits of using Elixir when dealing with airline data.
Steve gives listeners an overview of Duffel’s pipeline.
Insights into the types of engineers that Duffel hires.
Who Duffel’s clients are and how they’re onboarded.
Steve reflects on some airline API horror stories.
Hear about Duffel’s roadmap — the future is bright.
What Elixir has uniquely enabled Duffel to do.
Steve’s advice on selling Elixir to stakeholders in your company.
The status of the London Elixir Meetup.

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

Special Guest: Steve Domin.

Previous Episode

Shawn Vo on Elixir as a Competitive Advantage

To beat out their competitors, startups need to code quickly, simply, and in a language that attracts top engineers. Enter Elixir. Today we speak with Shawn Vo, Axle Payments Co-Founder and CTO, about his journey with Elixir and how it has given his company a competitive advantage. We open our conversation by exploring how Shawn got into coding while automating his work as an investment banker. After touching on why he sees programming as a superpower for adding value, he shares his growth hacks for learning a language — these range from reading old books to attending coding meetups. We then dive into Axle Payments’ business model, with Shawn highlighting the business opportunity of creating tech for industries that “people don’t think about.” A key theme in this episode, Shawn talks about how building in Elixir has helped Axle Payments hire the best engineers. We also discuss how Elixir allows them to quickly and efficiently write code that doesn’t break. Near the end of the episode, we explore Shawn’s browser extension projects and why he has a readme file to help guide people who want to work with him. Be sure to tune in to hear more insight from Shawn on the benefits of using Elixir in the startup space.

Key Points From This Episode:

Introducing Axle Payments CTO Shawn Vo.
From investment banking to coding, hear how Shawn got into our industry.
Why coding and creating content are top ways of creating value.
Reading books and getting into the fundamentals; tips on how Shawn learns a language.
Shawn shares details about his professional career.
How Shawn grew his skills by attending coding meetups.
Hear about Axle Payments’ model providing a factoring service.
How Shawn discovered and fell in love with Elixir.
Why Elixir has given Axle Payments their competitive advantage.
Shawn reflects on his first Elixir project.
The benefits of using event sourcing to build your app.
Why Shawn created a readme to guide people who want to work with him.
Shawn summarizes why Elixir is the perfect language for his company.

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

Shawn Vo on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/shawnvo/
Shawn Vo on Twitter — https://twitter.com/shawnvo
Shawn Vo on GitHub — https://github.com/voshawn
Shawn Vo Email — [email protected]
Axle Payments — https://www.axlepayments.com/
The Technical Cofounder Newsletter — https://technicalcofounder.substack.com/
Meryl Dakin — https://twitter.com/meryldakin
WALL-E — https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0910970/
Barclays Investment Bank — https://www.investmentbank.barclays.com/
The Climate Corporation — https://www.climate.com/
The Monsanto Company — https://www.cropscience.bayer.com/
Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation — https://www.fdic.gov/
Deep Learning NYC — https://www.meetup.com/Deep-Learning-NYC/
Baltimore AI Meetup — https://www.meetup.com/Baltimore-AI/
Fast.ai — https://www.fast.ai/
Megabus — https://www.megabus.com/
Greyhound — https://www.greyhound.com/
Techstars — https://www.techstars.com/
Peter Thiel — https://www.forbes.com/profile/peter-thiel/
WeWork — https://www.wework.com/
Paul Graham — http://www.paulgraham.com/
Y Combinator — https://www.ycombinator.com/
‘The Python Paradox’ — http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html
Heroku — https://www.heroku.com/
Sessionizer —

Next Episode

Jason Axelson on the Elixir Language Server

Welcome back to the Elixir Wizards podcast! In this episode, we will be continuing our conversation on the theme of adopting elixir, and our great guest for today is Jason Axelson! Jason is a back-end developer for a mixed reality studio called Animal Repair Shop and has also made some significant contributions to the Elixir Language Server project. We kick off our conversation with Jason hearing about his programming journey and then dive into the event chat service app he helped build using Elixir while he was working at Hobnob. From there, we talk about some of his aha moments while learning Elixir and some of his favorite features about the language which he is putting to use building out the back end for Animal Repair Shop. Next, we turn our attention to Elixir Language Server and Jason weighs in on the IDE type features it offers, why he got started as a collaborator on the project, and some of their challenges in the field of shared governance. Wrapping up for today, Jason makes a few suggestions for how devs who love Elixir can convince their teams to adopt it as a more mainstream option. Tune in for a great chat on the topic of adopting Elixir!

Key Points From This Episode:

An introduction to Jason Axelson and the story of how he got into programming.
Some of the books our hosts and guests read as kids and how they relate to programming.
How Jason got into Elixir while working on a chat service for events app at Hobnob.
Jason’s current project using Elixir to build the back end for Animal Repair Shop.
What caused Hobnob to switch to Elixir for their chat app and Jason’s aha moments learning it.
The TLDR version of the project that birthed ‘Road to 2 Million WebSocket Connections’.
What Jason loves about Elixir — pattern matching, immutability, explicitness.
Why Jason and his team at Animal Repair Shop are building their back end in Elixir.
The features provided by the Elixir Language Server for giving IDEs Elixir type support.
Jason’s involvement with GitHub/ElixirLSP; why he got involved, the project’s architecture, etc.
Some of the most challenging aspects of working on ElixirLS for Jason.
Jason’s talk on ElixirLS at ElixirConf – its content, doing it virtually, and more.
New features in the pipeline for ElixirLS; formatting speed improvements and more.
The role that good tooling plays in being able to learn a language more easily.
What needs to happen for Elixir to become a more mainstream back end option.
Advice from Jason regarding ways to convince your firm to adopt Elixir.