Lars wrote a Changelog Post introducing the PETAL stack last week. Now he’s back with something a little more actionable, for those intrigued by the proposition.

There’s a new stack in town. PETAL. It destructures to Phoenix, Elixir, Tailwind, Alpine and LiveView. So what is it? Well, it helps you build web applications. Let me tell you about it…

In a recent episode of JS Party we were told that you can program in CSS. But you can do some less complicated things with bigger payoffs. You can use CSS to track users that have JS disabled. Not sure how to feel about that. This post covers the rough idea of it and wants your thoughts on the practice.

The Nerves Keyboard project is a small group of enthusiasts using the IoT tooling from the Nerves project to build a mechanical keyboard that can be programmed and customized with Elixir. The work happens in the open and is currently moving towards the hardware stage. This is a quick getting-started tutorial.

Lars Wikman:

With Microsoft’s strong push into open source it is easy to assume that they are fully open source and that their flagship code editor and its cool LiveShare and Remote extensions are there to play nice with the wider world of free software and open source. This is not entirely the case as this post outlines.

Lars Wikman:

A bit of writing on what potential we leave on the table when we use tools that trade technical merit for other factors. And why Elixir just might have higher potential for web services than many other popular languages and runtimes.

Lars Wikman:

I’ve been thinking a lot about inexperienced (junior, if you must) web developers and just how much there is to learn about programming in general but the web in particular. You often hear people say that you don’t need to know everything but you should have a solid foundation. Well, how do you establish a solid foundation and how do you know if you have one? How do you get introduced to all the relevant terminology and how do you find out what you haven’t learned yet?

To help with this, Lars created a self-evaluation checklist tool.

Lars Wikman:

The Lumen Project is an alternative implementation of the Erlang VM, more known as the BEAM. It is designed to work in WebAssembly with the specific goal of bringing Elixir and Erlang to the browser with minimal overhead, tightly compiled rather than porting a full VM. Can it replace JS for some developers?

An excellent article, highly recommended. Lars hangs out in our community chat and suggested we do an episode with the Lumen team. Talks are underway, so stay tuned for that.