Tjaco Oostdijk on Drums to Elixir
From Elixir Mentor by Jacob Luetzow
June 7, 2026 · 1h 31m · Season 1 · Episode 86
About this episode
Tjaco Oostdijk discusses his journey from professional drummer to Elixir developer at DPG Media, focusing on enterprise applications and AI tooling.
In this episode of the Elixir Mentor Podcast, I talk with Tjaco Oostdijk, a drummer turned Elixir developer now working at DPG Media, one of the largest media companies in the Netherlands. Tjaco played drums professionally from the age of seven and has taught for 22 years, before landing in software through a music distribution company writing Ruby and eventually moving to Elixir nearly a decade ago. We get into what it takes to keep Elixir running inside a large enterprise. DPG adopted Elixir after a high-traffic Ruby service fell over at scale, and Tjaco describes the reality of working in a locked-down environment standardized on Kotlin, using Copilot with Anthropic models while waiting for Claude Code to be approved. He also talks about the colleagues who stay skeptical of AI tooling and why that skepticism can be healthy. The heart of the conversation is muziekles.app, the application Tjaco built for Dutch music teachers to run their entire teaching practice, from year-long scheduling and student accounts to homework and assignments. He explains why he deliberately keeps payments out of the product, how he thinks about onboarding teachers, and the build process using…
People in this episode
Host: Jacob Luetzow
Guest: Tjaco Oostdijk
Topics covered
- Elixir development
- music education
- software engineering
- AI tooling
- enterprise applications
- side projects
Keywords
- Elixir
- DPG Media
- muziekles.app
- AI tooling
- Phoenix
- software development
- music education
- Ruby
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: DPG Media
Products: muziekles.app, Ruby, Elixir, Phoenix, Ash, Claude Code, Tidewave
Places: Netherlands, locked-down environment
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