Articles by Thomas Fisher

Thomas Fisher

Thomas Fisher

Elixir in the Trenches

At Carbon Five, we’ve been getting excited about Elixir and Phoenix – with its promise of the productivity of Ruby and Rails without the performance penalty. We’ve used it for a few of our internal projects with great success, but we’re always wary of any new technology’s hype cycle. We wanted a bit more experience

Thomas Fisher

Thomas Fisher

Special Processes in OTP

On a recent Elixir project, I needed to test some asynchronous behaviour. Doing so led me to learn about the basics of special processes in OTP. Our project was using Phoenix Channels and had a need to keep track of all connected socket processes. We could have used the upcoming Phoenix presence feature, but we

Thomas Fisher

Thomas Fisher

Concurrent Acceptance Testing in Elixir

If you’ve practiced Test-Driven Development, you know that fast-to-execute tests are more than just a nice-to-have. As suites get slow, developers run them less often locally. Failures start to crop up in the CI environment, and the length of time between a breaking change and its detection increases. The problem gets worse with acceptance tests.

Painting colors
Thomas Fisher

Thomas Fisher

WebRTC Made Simple

WebRTC is a set of JavaScript APIs that enable peer-to-peer, realtime communication between web browsers. It offers some pretty amazing capabilities, but getting through even a basic introduction to it can be daunting. The variety of new APIs and protocols is a lot to digest. This post is a simple guide to getting up-and-running with

Thomas Fisher

Thomas Fisher

Building a Real-time Scoring System for the NPGL

This Tuesday in Madison Square Garden, the National Pro Grid League will have its first regular season match. Three months ago, we started building the real-time scoring system that backs its events. Here’s how we did it: Madison Square Garden

Thomas Fisher

Thomas Fisher

AngularJS Scopes: An Introduction

[raw] At Carbon Five, we build quite a few AngularJS projects. It’s a fun, powerful framework that gets you up and running quickly, but once you’ve got your feet wet, you run into its infamous learning curve. AngularJS has a fair share of deep concepts; taking some time to understand them can get you back