It’s been a long journey for my Elixir encryption library, Cloak, but we’re finally getting close to a full 1.0.0 release! Since I first published the library on Hex in 2015, both I myself and the community have added: Support for a wide variety of data types Local configuration through Vaults Stronger encryption with AES.GCM support A fully functional key rotation task, using cursors Guides and documentation A 200% performance increase ..read more

As I have written previously, I had a burning question I wanted to answer while attending this year’s ElixirConf: “Is Elixir good enough to demand mainstream adoption?” Now that ElixirConf 2018 is behind us, I think the answer is definitely yes. But it’s not for the reasons I expected. My Expectations vs. Reality I adopted Elixir very early on in 2014, because I was bored at my day job and I saw its potential ..read more

ElixirConf 2018 is coming up fast, and they’ve announced the schedule, so I thought I’d put together a list of the talks I want to attend and why. I have two goals for this conference: Find out what kinds of projects people are building in Elixir Learn what (if anything) makes Elixir uniquely good for those projects My sense of the Elixir community is that we often use Elixir to build monolithic stateless apps backed by a single database ..read more

With Phoenix 1.3 well behind us now, Elixir developers understand how to approach most problems “The Elixir Way”: Create a well-named context module for the problem, e.g. “Payment” Put functions in it, which don’t expose how data is persisted Profit ..read more

Software projects fail all the time. In fact, if you do client or startup work, you may never yet have built a piece of software that was commercially successful ..read more

If you’ve spent any time with React or its look-a-likes, you’ve probably realized that most web apps have a lot of duplication in their templates. This is particularly true of server-rendered apps ..read more

We all have logic in our applications like this: When a user is created, send a notification to an admin When a post is deleted, remove it from the search cache When a password is reset, log out that user’s active sessions These side effects need to be predictable and reliable. Often, they’re some of the key business logic of the whole application ..read more

I recently picked up a copy of Game Programming Patterns, and started messing around with implementing some of them in Elixir. I very quickly ran into some trouble dealing with multidimensional arrays ..read more

In Ruby on Rails, it’s very common to use background worker libraries like Sidekiq to speed up requests and do work asynchronously. Rather than doing all the work that needs to be done inline (and blocking other requests), a background job can speed things up significantly. Sidekiq is great, and you should definitely use it in your Ruby projects ..read more

Public facing websites need to have some basic search engine optimization (SEO) tags, such as <title> and <meta name="description">. In Rails, you could achieve this pretty simply by putting a yield :head tag in the appropriate layout ..read more