What Should Software Remember? with Flora Petterson

In this episode of Elixir Wizards, Charles Suggs and Emma Whamond are joined by Flora Petterson, a self-taught Elixir developer, speaker, and maker, to talk about what happens when software systems forget and how developers can design for recovery.

Flora shares her unconventional path to programming, from puppetry and creative work to discovering Elixir through Nerves and hardware projects. The conversation centers on her talk, “After the Crash,” which uses forgetting as a way to think about failure in software systems. Flora and the hosts explore process crashes, lost state, GenServer lifecycle, supervision, “let it crash,” and the difference between preventing failure and building systems that know how to recover.

The episode also expands from software memory to team memory. Flora discusses documentation, institutional knowledge, mentorship, storytelling, and the challenge of preserving both what a system does and why decisions were made. Along the way, she shares how creative, low-stakes projects can help developers build deeper technical understanding and how the Elixir community can continue supporting new and self-taught engineers.

Key topics discussed in this episode:

Learning through experimentation with Nerves, hardware, and animatronics

What it means for software systems to “forget”

Failure, recovery, and lost state in the BEAM

GenServer lifecycle and process recovery

The nuance behind “let it crash”

What supervision trees can and cannot protect

Designing systems to recover from failure

Deciding when state should be recovered or abandoned