This week Elixir creator José Valim joins Jerod and Practical AI’s Daniel Whitenack to discuss Numerical Elixir, his new project that’s bringing Elixir into the world of machine learning. We discuss why José chose this as his next direction, the team’s layered approach, influences and collaborators on this effort, and their awesome collaborative notebook project that’s built on Phoenix LiveView.

Mark Eriksen:

Many great Phoenix LiveView examples exist. They often show the ease and power of LiveView but stop at multiple browsers talking to a single web server. I wanted to go further and create a fully clustered, globally distributed, privately networked, secure application. What’s more, I wanted to have fun doing it.

So I set out to see if I could create a fully distributed, clustered, privately networked, global game server system. Spoiler Alert: I did.

I like the way he frames his experience. He says the most remarkable thing about it is not what he built, it’s what he didn’t need to build in order to accomplish his goal.

Jose Valim (the creator of Elixir) recently asked developers from all programming languages to contribute a solution to a short coding challenge based on a real world use case that I had come up while building an Elixir application. Here’s what happened.

You can think of this like Intercom or Drift, only it’s open source and self-hosted (unless you use their hosted offering).

We wanted to make a self-hosted version of tools like Intercom and Drift for companies that have privacy and security concerns about having customer data going to third party services. We’re starting with chat right now but we want to expand into all forms of customer communication like email campaigns and push notifications.

Try out the live chat widget on their demo page.

This is one of the least ranty “I’ve switched from X to Y” posts I’ve read and it’s filled with knowledge regarding the importance of data structures:

If you have solid foundation, the house will come with little effort. If the foundation is mud and sticks on top of a trash heap, your life as a builder is going to be complicated.

This principle applies to tools in a broader sense. You want to do the least work possible when swinging a sledgehammer, so you design it such that the hammer is a much heavier material than the handle. This gives you leverage. If you designed your sledgehammer in the inverse, you’d have to swing it harder every time you used it.

Elixir creator José Valim stopped by the Thinking Elixir podcast to reveal what he’s been working on for the past 3 months: Numerical Elixir!

This is an exciting development that brings Elixir into areas it hasn’t been used before. We also talk about what this means for Elixir and the community going forward. A must listen!

Queue up this episode and/or stay tuned for an upcoming episode of The Changelog where we’ll sit down with José after his LambdaDays demo to unpack things even more.

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…

This is a great rundown by José Valim of what the Elixir community has been up to recently and what’s coming in 2021. Exciting times! I’m particularly excited by the upcoming JIT compiler for the Erlang VM and what it might do to improve compilation times.

As the editor of the Elixir Radar newsletter, I read lots of articles related to Elixir every single week. Along the year I read probably more than 700 articles, so I could curate the best ones and send them to Elixir Radar’s subscribers.

In this article, I share the 11 most popular articles on Elixir Radar in 2020. Those are the ones that had the biggest engagement from Elixir Radar subscribers in each month of 2020, in terms of CTOR (click-to-open rate).

Sometimes a seemingly simple and straightforward function hides a surprising performance profile.

This blog post shows how to combine a few tools available with Elixir, OTP, and related ecosystem in order to understand and improve the memory footprint of an HTTP call.

FooBar |> defmodule([{:do, (
  a
  |> foo()
  |> def([{:do, a |> Kernel.<(0) |> if([{:do, a |> bar(-1)}, {:else, a |> bar(1)}])}])

  a |> bar(b) |> defp([{:do, a |> Kernel.*(b) |> IO.inspect()}])
)}])

I’ve got a fever and the only prescription is more |>s.

We’re joined by co-founder of Plataformatec and curator of the excellent Elixir Radar newsletter, Hugo Baraúna. We talk Elixir podcasts, the start of a new chapter for Hugo, his experimentations with Elixir Radar, curating content, how to make money, stuff like that.

Steven Fuchs loves his Sonos, but…

While it is the radio of the future, our most common usage is as the radio of the past. We tend to tune it to one station and leave it there. By far, our most common interactions with the system are changing the volume and pausing/playing the music, often creating scrambles to find a phone to turn down the volume in order to answer a different phone. What we needed was an analog interface to this digital system that was always at arms reach.

Hackers gonna hack. Steven reached for Elixir and scratched his own itch with this very cool little hardware project. Here’s a demo video of it in action.

A Native Implemented Function is implemented in C (or Rust when using Rustler) and can be called from Elixir or Erlang just like any other function. It’s the simplest and fastest way to run native code from Erlang but it does come with a caveat: a crash in a NIF can bring down the whole BEAM. This makes Rust a safer option than C for implementing NIFs as its type system and ownership model guarantee memory and thread-safety.

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.

I thought it’d be cool to get mix test and mix format running on pushes to the changelog.com repo, so I gave GitHub Actions the old college try. After (not too much) futzing around on my own, I figured I’d have more success by getting an expert to help out. Good call be me! 😆

In this ~1 hour jam session, we go from zero to a successful Actions workflow. I learned a lot along the way, and you might too by joining us on the journey. Thanks, Jonathan!

We’re joined again by José Valim talking about the recent acquihire of Plataformatec and what that means for the Elixir language, as well as José. We also talk about Dashbit a new 3 person company he helped form from work done while at Plataformatec to help startups and enterprises adopt and run Elixir in production. Lastly we talk about a new idea José has called Bytepack that aims to help developers package and deliver software products to developers and enterprises.

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.

This comes from the just-announced Supabase, which is “an open source alternative to Firebase”. Oh, and if you’re thinking NOTIFY is good enough… maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.

Long-time listener (and YouTube aficionado) Owen Bickford joins Jerod backstage to discuss his recent contribution to Changelog’s Elixir/Phoenix-based open source platform.

Wondering why your Phoenix application is recompiling dozens or hundreds of files every time you make a small change? Cross-module compilation dependencies are often to blame.

Chris McCord:

Phoenix v1.5 has been released with LiveView integration. This release makes it easier than ever to build interactive, real-time applications. We put together a quick screencast to show just how much you can accomplish in 15 minutes with LiveView

After José’s announcement yesterday I just had to get my hands a little dirty and kick the tires.

José and the Phoenix team just announced this cool new dashboard for monitoring real-time performance of your production Phoenix systems. I’ll be setting this up and kicking the tires on changelog.com ASAP.