Andrew Evans agius

layout	default
title	A stateful key/value server in Elixir

I wanted to make a simple key-value server in Elixir - json in, json out, GET, POST, with an in-memory map. The point is to reinvent the wheel, and learn me some Elixir. My questions were: a) how do I build this without Phoenix and b) how do I persist state between requests in a functional language?

Learning new stuff is always painful, so this was frustrating at points and harder than I expected. But I want to emphasize that I did get it working, and do understand a lot more about how Elixir does things - the community posts and extensive documentation were great, and I didn't have to bug anyone on StackOverflow or IRC or anything to figure all this out.

Here's what the learning & development process sounded like from inside my head.

Keybase proof

I hereby claim:

I am agius on github.
I am agius (https://keybase.io/agius) on keybase.
I have a public key ASCg_5QsCmV8z2ofsrvRmoaigJgOsgFcL4erYY4kzr7ViAo

To claim this, I am signing this object:

	=begin
	PlanckJS - or: why the FUCK do you have 700+ dependencies?

	Planck-scale libraries are not just microlibraries, they're even BETTER! They're so micro
	they're beyond nanolibraries. They have _more boilerplate code than actual code!_ So composable.
	Such Unix philosophy. Wow.

	Back in my day, we called these things "functions" and put them in our code, rather than
	descending into package-management hell with a broken tool like npm.