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…

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PETAL Stack in Elixir

PETAL Stack parts

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…

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News for 2020-11-10

News items from episode #21. Gleam 0.12 has been released, including Gleam OTP 0.1.2 https://gleam.run/news/gleam-v0.12-and-gleam-otp-v0.1-released/https://twitter.com/gleamlang/status/1322650886179573760 New OS based on Elixir and Erlang The Kry10 Secure Platform (KSP) is an Operating System on a microkernel called seL4®. It is built with Erlang, and Elixir technologies. https://twitter.com/boydmulterer/status/1323118735318642688https://kry10.com/blog/intro_to_kry10https://kry10.com/ Hex.pm adds downloads charts As a hacktober project, Todd Resudek…

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News for 2020-11-03

News items from episode #20. SpawnFest winners were announced https://spawnfest.github.io/winners Bakeware was the overall winnerBakeware extends Mix releases with the ability to turn Elixir projects into single binaries that can be copied and directly run. No need to install Erlang or untar files. The binaries look and feel like the artifacts from other languages like…

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News 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…

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News 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…

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Elixir 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…

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REST vs GraphQL for an API

Choosing REST vs GraphQL

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…

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Elixir 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…

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VS Code Broken for Elixir

Broken for Elixir - VS Code

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…

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