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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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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Install Elixir using asdf

Install 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…

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Elixir 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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Creating Your First Mix Project

Creating an Elixir mix project is really easy. A mix project provides some basic structure, sets up a unit testing framework, and can grow with you. When Elixir is installed, it registers a mix command. I create a new project named playing with the command mix new playing. This is what happens: There are two…

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Running an Elixir File as a Script

Elixir is able to run “scripts” or files that are compiled into memory (not on disk) and executed. This is helpful when experimenting with larger Elixir code snippets. This is also helpful if you just want to occasionally run one-off scripts to perform some work and exit. File: my_test_script.exs To execute the file, from a…

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