Making a Real World Phoenix Blog

There’s a lot of articles about how to make a blog in Phoenix/Elixir but most of them are light on features. Instead of doing the “Hello World” of Phoenix blog apps, I’d thought I’d talk about the real work it takes to make a professional blog with real features you might need.

Automated Fault Tolerance using the Circuit Breaker Pattern

In this post, we will discuss a new technique called “circuit breakers” that we have used to make our site more fault tolerant. Circuit breakers are a solution to the problem of quickly detecting and remediating the situation when an external dependency starts failing.

First Impression of Elixir, from a Rubyist’s Perspective

If you’re a Rubyist, you might have heard of Elixir: the new functional language with Ruby-like syntax created by José Valim, who used to be on the Rails core team. If you’re curious about it and wondering if you should give it a try, this post is for you!

Form inputs for array Ecto types in Phoenix

Did you know you could use Elixir Maps and Lists in your Ecto schemas? Have you ever tried making an edit form for a collection type? We'll do that today, starting from the basic Phoenix app from last time.

On Graphvix

Around a year and a half ago, when I was first really digging into Elixir, a yak’s worth of nested side projects got me to wanting to implement Graphviz, specifically the .dot notation, in Elixir.