Just an update, I’ve added support for uploading/download posts via JSON. For more info see here: https://sceopa.com/posts/17

ps. If anyone wants to look at the code for this feature (or code review it which would be awesome ) you can see the commit here: Add support for uploading multiple posts from json file (793fa9e3) · Commits · James Long / sceopa · GitLab, the main function is:

  def import_posts(user, file) do
    with {:ok, contents} <- File.read(file.path),
         {:ok, %{"posts" => posts}} <- Poison.decode(contents),
         {:ok, _results} <-
           posts
           |> Enum.map(fn params ->
             assoc = build_assoc(user, :posts)
             Post.changeset(assoc, params)
           end)
           |> Enum.with_index()
           |> Enum.reduce(Multi.new(), fn {changeset, index}, multi ->
             Multi.insert(multi, index, changeset)
           end)
           |> Repo.transaction(),
      do: {:ok}
  end

Well as far as learning Elixir goes, I’ve been working through quite a few exercism exercises which have helped. I’m still very much a noob when it comes to OTP but am working through Elixir in Action to help with this. Overall I think there are a lot of good learning resources out there for the core language.

The two main difficulties I had were I guess the standard ones:

a) lack of libraries

e.g. For this project I wanted to have server-side syntax-highlighting. There are good libraries for this in python, haskell, and ruby, but not elixir (I ended up using Pandoc for this which is written in Haskell).

b) deployment

Setting up Heroku deployment and SSL was a bit of a pain, but mainly because I’m new to this. There are elixir/phoenix buildpacks for Heroku which are very helpful.

Use the force of Pattern Matching you much (or at least try ;))

above can be written as

defp put_email_key(%Ecto.Changeset{valid?: false} = changeset), do: changeset
defp put_email_key(%Ecto.Changeset{valid?: true} = changeset) do
  put_change(changeset, :email_verification_key, gen_email_key())
end