Blog Archives - Thinking Elixir

All courses are now free!

Mark Ericksen — Sat, 09 Aug 2025 20:35:18 +0000

Dear Thinking Elixir community, I have some exciting news! What’s Changed Over the past months, the small WordPress server has been repeatedly knocked down by bot traffic attempting to break into the site. After getting tired of dealing with these ongoing stability and security challenges, I made the decision to convert ThinkingElixir.com to a static…

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PETAL Stack in Elixir

Mark Ericksen — Tue, 12 Jan 2021 14:46:54 +0000

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

Mark Ericksen — Tue, 06 Oct 2020 18:37:15 +0000

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

Mark Ericksen — Mon, 06 Jul 2020 14:39:48 +0000

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

Mark Ericksen — Tue, 25 Feb 2020 11:56:10 +0000

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

Mark Ericksen — Thu, 21 Nov 2019 14:57:01 +0000

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

Mark Ericksen — Tue, 19 Nov 2019 15:31:36 +0000

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

Mark Ericksen — Wed, 23 Oct 2019 03:19:02 +0000

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

Mark Ericksen — Fri, 19 Apr 2019 16:35:15 +0000

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

Mark Ericksen — Fri, 19 Apr 2019 16:34:58 +0000

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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