Posts by Mark Ericksen
Elixir 1.12 and Your First Mix.install Script
Elixir 1.12 was released and it includes a number of exciting things. The one I’m going to focus on here is Mix.install/2. This makes it easier to use Elixir when scripting. When Elixir 1.12 is paired with OTP 24 (which was released one week earlier), then you get even more benefits. The most notable is…
Read MorePETAL Stack in Elixir
The PETAL Stack in Elixir means: Phoenix Elixir TailwindCSS Alpine.js LiveView While PETAL is also a pretty sounding name, this technology combination is extremely powerful and productive for the right kinds of projects. What kinds of projects? Web applications (or SaaS) with a responsive and reactive UI. This isn’t for building an API first service…
Read MoreNews for 2020-10-27
News from episode #19. Elixir v1.11.1 Released with fixes If you’ve already moved up to Elixir 1.11.0, make sure to get the latest bug fix updates. https://twitter.com/elixirlang/status/1317021884475711490 https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/releases/tag/v1.11.1 phoenix_live_dashboard v0.3.0 released Jose Valim shared a Twitter thread discussing the enhancements which includes screenshots to illustrate new features. Improvements include: Adding Ecto Stats that shows relevant…
Read MoreNews for 2020-10-20
News from episode #18. New Elixir case study with Discord https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2020/10/08/real-time-communication-at-scale-with-elixir-at-discord/ They have crossed more than 12 million concurrent users across all servers, with more than 26 million WebSocket events to clients per second Discord runs a cluster with 400-500 Elixir machines maintained by 5 engineers. Discord used Rust to create a new type in…
Read MoreElixir 1.11 and Erlang Docs
One of the nice new features in Elixir 1.11 is the ability to show the docs for Erlang functions. This helps you see things that you couldn’t see before. This is a short guide to help you get it working if you encountered any problems. There are a couple prerequisites to make this work. Must…
Read MoreREST vs GraphQL for an API
The goal here is to help you think about and consider the costs and benefits of building a REST vs GraphQL API for your next project. Technology decisions often include thinking about the trade-offs. Hopefully this can help you evaluate these two technologies and approaches. Scenario You have experience writing and using REST APIs. You’ve…
Read MoreElixir in the Type System Quadrant
Programming languages are created with different kinds of type systems. When “Thinking Elixir”, it is helpful to know where Elixir sits in the Type System Quadrant and where that is relative to the language you are coming from. Beyond coming from OO, you may also be coming from a different area of the Type System…
Read MoreVS Code Broken for Elixir
You tried using VS Code for Elixir development. You tried out the ElixirLS extension for code insight and code completion. However, the ElixirLS extension kept crashing and never worked for you. This post can help you diagnose the issue and fix it. Let’s get you back on the productive path with your Elixir development. What’s…
Read MoreInstall Elixir using asdf
There are a number of ways to install Elixir. However, to get the best experience, there are some non-obvious things you need to pay attention to. Here I’ll walk you through how to do this on MacOS and Linux using the asdf version manager project. Why is this important? Many people (myself included) have unknowingly…
Read MoreElixir in VS Code
Visual Studio Code has become a very popular code editor. If you need a code editor for working with Elixir and you don’t already have one in mind, then I suggest giving VS Code a try. This post walks you through setting it up for Elixir development. Elixir development extensions There are many Elixir plug-ins…
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