Changelog

Rémi Prévost: Accent is an internal tool we built to help us manage translations for the applications we develop at Mirego. We used Elixir (Phoenix and Absinthe) and Ember.js and just a few weeks ago we open-sourced the project so we could share it with the community since there are not a lot of fully-working open-source Web applications for both of these technologies. Very cool. I've been toying with the idea of a GraphQL API around our news and podcasts. I should 👀 under the covers and see how Accent's is built.

René Föhring shows how Plug.Conn and Ecto.Changeset are great examples of an advanced style of "flow" management where your program hands down a "token" (in practice, an Elixir struct) during execution.

Zack Kayser built a Texas Hold ‘Em app with the EEP (?) stack and wrote up his findings. He calls Elm and Elixir "a match made in Functional Heaven", but the endeavor wasn't without its challenges: I personally struggled with 1) how to organize my code, especially with larger modules, 2) figuring out how to make the UI more interactive, and 3) sharing code across modules. There's a lot to learn from Zack's experience. Both the Elm front-end and Phoenix back-end are open source. ✊

Chris McCord with a great round-up of advancements to the popular Elixir web framework. Highlights include H2 support, faster dev compilation, and a harder/better/faster/stronger JSON encoding library.

Cowboy 2.1 supports H2, but Plug and Phoenix haven't released their official support yet. In this article, Chase Gilliam walks you through the steps to get your Phoenix app up and running with the new HTTP standard today.

Great list, and I agree with many of Vladimir's points. However, I have to admit that Ecto's take on preloading still bugs me after years of use. I find myself doing the preload dance all over the place even when I'm well aware of the performance issues around N+1 queries. I thought I'd get used to it over time, but it still irks me every time I see an Ecto.Association.NotLoaded exception.

Ecto's issues have been cleaned up and tagged with labels like Level:Advanced, Level:Intermediate, and Level:Starter to make it easier to know where you'd like to contribute. @elixirlang on Twitter: We have just tidied up the issues tracker for Ecto. If you were planning to contribute, pull requests and feedback are definitely welcome. #

This is a great introduction to the Mox library written by José Valim and the Plataformatec team. Mox' philosophy: A simple summary is that when it comes to dependency injection, mocks should not be created ad-hoc. Instead, they should be constrained by predefined behaviours. This helps enforce contracts between modules, and it also makes tests easier to maintain and understand. We've been using the Mock library when testing against 3rd party services, and it works as advertised. However, we don't test our controllers in isolation like in this post. Should we be?

Run Elm on the server, via Elixir. Interesting idea...

Meta-programming in Elixir is all about macros. The use macro is one you'll run in to often, and DockYard's Luke Imhoff does a nice treatment of using use in this post.

We talked with Tim Mecklem about building an artificial Pancreas with Elixir and Nerves to help those with Type 1 Diabetes who want to "loop" — a process which involves monitoring glucose levels, predicting where a person's glucose levels are heading, then delivering insulin based on that prediction. Tim is a Developer at Gaslight in Cincinnati where he builds software solutions with Ruby and Elixir, and he's a member of the Nerves Core team.

José Valim and Chris McCord joined the show to talk all about how they're advancing the "state of the art" in the Elixir community with their release of Ecto 2.0 and Phoenix 1.2. We also share our journey with Elixir at The Changelog, find out what makes Phoenix's new Presence feature so special, and even find time for Chris to field a few of our support requests.

José Valim joined the show to talk about Elixir. We learned about the early days of José's start as a programmer. José took us back to the beginning of Elixir and shared why Erlang got him so excited, we broke down features of the language, we talked about functional programming, concurrency, developing for multi-core systems, we talked about the Elixir community, the future of Phoenix, Ecto, and more.

Brian Cardarella joined the show to talk about the bet he's placed on Elixir and Ember to be the focus of his company.

Chris McCord joined the show to take us on a deep dive into the Phoenix web framework and Elixir. We covered the similarities between Ruby and Erlang, getting started with Elixir, and deploying Phoenix. He also shared his plans for the 1.0 release and the future of Phoenix.

npm, Inc closed $2.6MM in funding, Node successes, Ansible & Docker, Gulp vs Grunt, Vue.js, Polymer Boilerplate, Forceps, REPL Driven Development, Phoenix for Elixir, and more. Read Weekly - Issue #24