Articles on Development
In Support of the “Snacklog”
Recently we’ve noticed a number of our clients maintain a backlog of small tasks that are handled separately from their main backlog. These are tasks that should be finished at some point, but will rarely take priority over business-critical features and bugfixes. Often they are bite-sized pieces of work that can be finished in a …
Idea: GenServers with Map-based state
I recently gave a talk at Empex LA in which I talked about my desire to see simplifications and enhancements to using some of the OTP behaviors offered in Elixir. In this post I’m going to explore a simple improvement to the GenServer API that would make it a little easier to work with. GenServers …
Pairing Retro
Back at my first job in tech, we paired 95% of the time. Many people were new to pairing. As it was my first job, I was relatively one of the more junior people on the team, which is an especially difficult position to be in for pairing. It was an incredibly intense experience for …
Problematic Terminology in Open-Source
It remains a common practice in database systems today to refer to configurations where one database is a source of truth, and another database is a replica that follows the state of the source of truth database as a “master/slave” configuration. Use of this term is problematic. It references slavery to convey meaning about the …
A Proposal: Elixir-Style Modules in JavaScript
Moving your code towards a more functional style can have a lot of benefits – it can be easier to reason about, easier to test, more declarative, and more. One thing that sometimes comes out worse in the move to FP, though, is organization. By comparison, Object Oriented Programming classes are a pretty useful unit …
Safely Migrating from Paperclip to Active Storage
Active Storage was introduced into Rails version 5.2. It is a highly anticipated addition to handle integrations with asset management such as AWS S3. For a long time, the field has been dominated by outside gems, including Paperclip, which has been around longer than many people have been Rails developers. Now that Active Storage has …
Lightweight Dependency Injection In Elixir (Without the Tears)
In our last Elixir blog post, “Functional Mocks with Mox in Elixir”, we discussed how testing across module boundaries could be made easier by creating a Behaviour for a collaborating module, then utilizing the wonderful framework Mox to substitute a lightweight mock module in tests. This approach is well and good when you have very concrete …
Comparing Dynamic Supervision Strategies in Elixir 1.5 and 1.6
Let’s say you’re managing complex process state in your Elixir application and you need a way to spin up and down new processes as your app runs. This requirement is known as dynamic supervision, the ability for a supervisor to add processes to its supervision tree at runtime. This post will explain how to implement …
An AJAX Auto-Save Implementation
For a recent client engagement, we were tasked with implementing auto-save on a multi-field form: any time any of the field values changed, we’d save the form to the server. This is a common scenario where users are composing longer inputs, such as emails, word processing, and spreadsheets.
Functional Mocks with Mox in Elixir
If you’re like me, you came over to Elixir from Ruby and quickly found that certain development assumptions so common to Ruby (and object-oriented programming) require some adjustment in this new functional language.