Colin Bankier colinbankier

#The Winds of Change

Here at Everyday Hero we’re a Ruby shop. We love Ruby. Ruby is great. We are however, starting to experiment with introducing other programming languages and technologies for our backend services into our repertoire. One of our new micro-services has been started in Elixir. In this post I’ll discuss our reasons for looking beyond Ruby at another programming language and technology.

Being a Ruby shop, nearly all our applications are written in Ruby - our oldest apps were started way back on Ruby 1.8 and Rails 1.0, and we now have a fleet of apps that keep up with the latest Ruby and Rails versions, as well as smaller services that use other frameworks like Sinatra or Napa. We have a long history (in Ruby terms) with this technology set. ###Why Ruby is Great I still remember the excitement I felt when I discovered Ruby (and Rails) in about 2006, and I’m pretty sure the reason Ruby gained such popularity is because so many developers felt the same thing. Ruby brought the joy back into prog

Deployment Pipeline (re-instate)
- CI (shippable or semaphore) triggers pipeline on successful master build
  - Probably 'Go' - has misgivings but does the job for now
- builds and pushes docker container artifact
- deploy to staging
  - smoke test
  - acceptance test
- Deploy to prod (auto-deploy can be optional e.g. supporter)
  - smoke test
Rollback on failure

Deployment Pipeline (re-instate)
- CI (shippable or semaphore) triggers pipeline on successful master build
  - Probably 'Go' - has misgivings but does the job for now
- builds and pushes docker container artifact
- deploy to staging
  - smoke test
  - acceptance test
- Deploy to prod (auto-deploy can be optional e.g. supporter)
  - smoke test
Rollback on failure

Brisbane Elixir

July 23, 2015

General

Welcome newcomers!

Introducing Card Shark

Last meetup Mark walked us through creating a RESTful database application in Phoenix, from scratch. We played with the HTML and JSON generators that ship with Phoenix to create a simple CRUD app. We want to keep building

Concurrency: the reason we're here

A bit of background

In Elixir, all code runs inside processes. Processes are isolated from each other, run concurrent to one another and communicate via message passing. Processes are not only the basis for concurrency in Elixir, but they also provide the means for building distributed and fault-tolerant programs.

Elixir’s processes should not be confused with operating system processes. Processes in Elixir are extremely lightweight in terms of memory and CPU (unlike threads in many other programming languages). Because of this, it is not uncommon to have tens or even hundreds of thousands of processes running simultaneously.

Processes

The most basic mechanism for creating processes is using the spawn/1 function:

Put a plug in it!

Elixir News

Latest release v1.2.2. 1.2.x brought us: Erlang 18 support

Faster compile times
Maps now support millions of keys efficiently - Dict/HashDict/Set/HashSet deprecated.

Brisbane Elixir

Elixir News

Elxirconf EU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A60nxws_iVs&list=PLWbHc_FXPo2gB7HUE-2H61HAEyszAph3H
Embedded Systems and Firmware are getting a lot of love in elixir http://nerves-project.org/news/2016/05/29/a-whirlwind-of-recent-changes/?utm_campaign=elixir_radar_53&utm_medium=email&utm_source=RD+Station
Faking HTTP APIs during testing https://pspdfkit.com/blog/2016/testing-http-apis-in-elixir/?utm_campaign=elixir_radar_53&utm_medium=email&utm_source=RD+Station
Wishing for Type Safety? Nice tute on using Dializer: https://medium.com/@barruumrex/seeking-simple-satisfaction-2a098902ddff#.aleu8m123
Keep up to date http://plataformatec.com.br/elixir-radar

Elixir in Action Part 1

Elixir News

Announcing GenStage http://elixir-lang.org/blog/2016/07/14/announcing-genstage/

Recap - Concurrency

https://gist.github.com/colinbankier/a3f2eb7642b94c0d610a

Elixir in Action

Elixir in Action, by Sasa Juric

	-module(index).
	-export([get_index/1]).

	% Used to read a file into a list of lines.
	% Example files available in:
	% gettysburg-address.txt (short)
	% dickens-christmas.txt (long)


	% Get the contents of a text file into a list of lines.

	%% Based on code from
	%% Erlang Programming
	%% Francecso Cesarini and Simon Thompson
	%% O'Reilly, 2008
	%% http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596518189/
	%% http://www.erlangprogramming.org/
	%% (c) Francesco Cesarini and Simon Thompson

	-module(frequency).
	-export([start/0, init/0, allocate/0, deallocate/1]).