What Elixir related stuff are you doing?

I read part 1 and 2 of Programming Elixir, it is a good book when you are interested in a good prose and are available to learn in a slow pace, it is great for the exercises, but I think that now the Starting Guide from https://elixir-lang.org is enough. I’m now reading Programming Phoenix and Learn You Some Erlang for the Great Good, and after that Elixir in Action and Designing for Scalability with Erlang/OTP (O’Reilly), so I think that start Programming Phoenix would be a good choose.

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I am probably going to leave any Erlang-specific learning till last (Saša has years of Erlang experience so you definitely get that point of view in Elixir in Action).

I might continue with PE for now then, and see if we hear anymore of when Programming Phoenix might get updated… :slight_smile:

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Just go for it. That update might take a while and don’t sweat the context stuff - while Phoenix may have tooling that relates to “contexts” - these type of tools cannot choose the right boundaries for you - that is still on you and for that you need practice and lots of time to think (Hammock time).

Just slow the pace a bit and cross-reference everything you run into in the official docs and guides - you’ll probably also run into useful stuff that doesn’t fit in the book.

Hmm… , I wonder if there might be a place where you can ask questions about Phoenix 1.3 when the book doesn’t make any sense …

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That does worry me a bit tbh - I am a ‘lazy learner’, which is why I love books (esp from publishers like Pragprog where they are continually updated) because I can just read them and by the end of it I am in possession of a good up-to-date overview - a la Matrix :lol:

Are there many things out of date in the current version of Programming Phoenix?

Well I’m not the best one to answer that question but to put things in context (there is that word again):

  • The book as it stands now will work the smoothest with 1.1.6 (2016-06-03) (through 1.1.9 (2017-05-15) may work as well).
  • Meanwhile 1.2.0 released 2016-06-23 - so if you were using the latest version even back then there were some kinks to work out.
  • I seem recall that Chris proclaimed in a number of talks that 1.3 isn’t that different from 1.2 (though he may have just been referring to the directory structure).

Also if I’m assessing your development background correctly, there is a chance that you may find the current incarnation of the book less jarring (especially if you slavishly stick to 1.1.6) as the first half of the book is pretty much in your typical “lets build a simple web application” style with all the usual trappings of setting up routing, controllers, etc. - it’s only in the second part of the book where the gears shift more toward the “phoenix is not your application” mindset. The new edition could possibly put “phoenix is not your application” more front and centre.

So it may be an idea to get through 1.1.6 now and then switch gears by giving Designing for Scalability with Erlang/OTP a go (given that you already completed Elixir in Action DSEOs Chapter 2 on Erlang is probably enough). Hopefully by the time you’ve finished that, the Phoenix 1.3 version of the book is available and you can skim through it with your new found understanding of OTP and deep dive into the parts that are new to you.

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I’m just starting up a major new initiative on our dev team here and I’m using Phoenix 1.3 - just thought I’d let you all know. The first commit just hit the the git repo.

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I’m building a server-to-server header-bidding application for the digital advertising real-time-bidding space.

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I started to learn Elixir to implement all my “startup ideas” using this technology and I also started to write a book about my journey here.

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Not much at the moment, but as I’ve just won some AppSignal, I’ll just have to get off my butt and write something to use it with! :wink:

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A phoenix web app currently in beta and an impersonation system for phoenix that allows admins to impersonate users (basically login as the user and show a little banner with a link to go back to being admin).

It’s not particularly impressive, but it looks like a good first hex package

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Attacking the exercism games. Only having the programming elixir book, @NobbZ help & a bit of SO. Biggest fun factor: passing the level.

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Well, I’ve been …

  • Watching José Valim last Keynote at EU Conf and other vids about elixir and phoenix.

  • Working on porting an old Rails app to Phoenix + webpack2 + boostrap4, and expect to introduce it at work when I reach at least 70% parity.

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are you open source?

Unfortunately no, besides it’s not that interesting project to be open source but very important at work. However, I’m thinking on other ideas that I’d like to open source that are more exciting.

I would like to work on these with you in any case, if you are thinking about open source…

I was just keen how you setup webpack and bootstrap 4 and everything, it didnt work for me at all ,

Nowadays, I’m working on a private messaging app. Erlang / Elixir FTW!

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A port of pygments for elixir. Pygments is a syntax highlighting library written for python. It supports lexers for hundreds of languages using a weird lexer format based on state machines powered by regex matches. The hard part is porting all the lexers. I’m using the excelent ExSpirit library by @OvermindDL1 for the lexers. It will be open source (MIT license probably)

EDIT: as of now, the library lexes elixir (but can’t turn it into HTML or any other format yet).

I’m gathering some generic helper lexer utilities that can be reused across lexers.

I plan on suporting some improvements over pygments, the biggest of which is highlighting matching delimiters ([ ], { }, << >>, etc.) The goal is to be able to render them in matching colors or (for the HTML backend) highlighting the pair when the mouse hovers on one of the elements.

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Further edit: the motivation for this is twofold:

  • I want to write an HTML visualization tool for elixir projects in which (among other things) you can click an identifier in the source to see where it was defined and doing that without proper syntax highlighting is a bit lame. If I can do the syntax highlighting in pure elixir, than the tool can be an installable mix task.

  • synatx highlighting in ExDocs is currently very bad

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I just released my first open source library ever! As such it is very simple but it helps you implement those common password character set requirements (e.g. at least one number, no symbols, etc).

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I decided to use Elixir / Phoenix as my development tool for my activity (www.codelessfuture.com), so I configured my Linux machine with Spacemacs and last version of Elixir and Phoenix and put together all resource for learning more.

I think of writing a story on Medium about this.

On september my site and all new work I do will be done in Phoenix.

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