Articles on Elixir

Andrew Hao

You’ve resolved to build your company’s Next Big Thing in Phoenix and Elixir. That’s great! You’re facing a problem though – all user authentication and access concerns are performed on your Rails system, and the work to reimplement this in Phoenix is significant. Fortunately for you, there is a great Phoenix plug to share session …

Thomas Fisher

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 …

Christian Nelson

Buzz has been building up around Elixir (and Phoenix) in the development community over the last year. We’re pretty excited about them too and want to share the reasons why they’ve piqued our interest and what we’ve learned so far. We decided to kick the tires by rewriting one of our in-house web applications using …

Chris Keathley

Feature tests are one of the best ways to ensure reliability and consistency for web applications. But, as we’ve discussed previously feature tests can become a performance bottleneck for a large test suite. With the fast approaching release of Ecto 2.0, Elixirists will be able to run feature tests for Phoenix applications concurrently. To take …

Thomas Fisher

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. …