This is question
to comply with the bonus entry requirement of
" Condition : Tell us what Elixir-related stuff you’ve been doing recently in this thread"
How recent should your last entry be?
shishini
krishna_vaguelyright
Building a chat app with Elixir/Phoenix. Learning the ropes. Breaking my head with Ecto mostly for now. 
Namit
egze
Launched my side-project: Newsmaker AI
Please check it out. Don’t break it, LOL.
If you want to keep up with news on social media like Twitter, but don’t want to constantly check for new posts - Newsmaker AI will do it for you. It will also summarize the content like a blog post and send it to you by email at the frequency you specify.
The stack is: Phoenix, LiveView, SQLite Postgres, Raspberry Pi, Kamal, CapRover.
That was a fun process.
Some things that I remember
- I wanted to try out self-hosting and Kamal for deployments. Ordered a Raspberry Pi with a NVMe drive. Set it up, hooked it up to my router and started playing with deployments. Raspberry Pi is also a very useful thing even without the hosting part. I installed AdGuardHome on it and now it blocks ads for all devices in the network.
This is where the site is hosted:
-
Turned out - Kamal didn’t really work for me, because of how my Pi is exposed to the internet. I tunnel traffic with Couldflare straight to the Pi and the container, so that I don’t need to worry about dynamic ips and also Cloudflare has some nice security features. Ended up with Caprover, it works quite nicely and also has a 1-click install thingy for Cloudflare. Really happy with this setup. Only downside is - when I deploy, the container is changed and it takes some seconds for Cloudflare to pick up the change. Users see a 500 in the meantime. Not great, but not terrible either. I moved all my projects to CapRover.
-
I initially started with SQLite, because I wanted to try it. Turns out - SQLite is a really great DB. I ended up contributing to ecto_sqlite and exqlite to make it work even nicer with Phoenix. [1] [2] Also learned that Oban works very well, but Oban Web doesn’t work with SQLite (also I can’t afford it for a side-project). Created Obanalyze to have a dashboard.
-
While SQLite is nice - I did run into some
Database busyerrors recently. With SQLite you can have 1 writer at a time.busy_timeouthelps, but I figured that it will only get worse with more users, so I jumped ship a couple of days ago and moved to Postgres. It was interesting to migrate the data, because I already had some users at this time, and I didn’t want to email them and ask to register again, because I moved to new DB
There are some tools to move data from SQLite to Postgres, like pgloader, but it didn’t work out of the box for me, so I wrote my own Elixir script that loaded data with Exqlite, converted it a bit and wrote to Postgres. Found out that when inserting data with my own IDs (I wanted to have IDs 1:1 like in SQLite), I needed to reset sequences in every table, because it doesn’t happen automatically (IMO, would be nice). -
Building the UI was also a nice challenge. I think I tried all available component libraries for LiveView and ended up buying Fluxon UI. It is really polished and I really liked that the components have the same look and feel. @andrielfn is also very supportive and fixes any issues very fast.
What’s next?
- Going to add Bluesky support next and some other sources. Maybe Reddit, HN and something else.
- Dedicate more time to experimenting with different prompts. It kinda works right now, but maybe could be improved.
- Think of a better algorithm to pick content before feeding it to AI. For example: if I follow the
#MyElixirStatushashtag and pickweeklynews - the amount of tweets in a week can be quite large (200-300). That’s probably already a big amount of data and if done at scale - my OpenAI bill will be significant. But how to reduce the dataset without losing the quality…
Things like this.
10
dimitarvp
Thanks for sharing, it was an enjoyable read. Just to point out: those two links are identical.
egze
mpraski
Building my side-project: livecheck.io
LiveView all the way for the dashboards, and Elixir for everything else (task scheduling, data ingestion, APIs). LiveView’s been great for fast prototyping so far, and with maturing ecosystem (Oban, Backpex etc.) it’s a great combo for SaaS development.
krishna_vaguelyright
Building backend for a chat app. Trying to understand Elixir, it doesnt come easy for sure.
seeplusplus
Just used Elixir as my language of choice for a coding assessment for an interview - I got the offer 
Aside from that, working on building a web-based clone of the game Boggle and some web scraping projects.
Lucassifoni
Working on integrating Astro, a static site generator, in my Elixir app.
Elixir installs Node on the system, then installs the Astro project’s dependencies, launches Astro’s dev server and proxies it and its websocket for hot module replacement, but only when the dev server runs.
That’s a bit of plumbing but will ultimately allow me to edit the site’s content within my Elixir app while making it truly static, meaning that content is persisted in the astro project, and if you were to launch it standalone without my app, your edits would still be there.
Then, of course, trigger a build and push it online.
When I click “change the title”, the title is changed and the scaled down website live-updates. Since everything is proxied there is no open port to Vite (astro’s dev server). Proxying also allows me to check for authentication and authorization in my app. (Is there an user ? Can them edit a website ?)
Next step, drag items from the liveview to the astro website.
