Digests » 279

Elixir, The story

Start your week right with some Elixir inspo. Have you seen Elixir: The Documentary yet? A couple of years ago, Honeypot produced the Elixir origin story, which explores how it came about and how it has grown since its creation (spoiler: it’s thanks to you, Elixir dev). Definitely worth a rewatch if you’ve seen it already ;)

How to build a self-healing system using supervision tree in Elixir

An intro into supervision trees in Elixir and how they can help you build fault-tolerant systems. It gives a short overview of what supervision trees are, what problems they solve, and how to build them, using two examples.

BLE + Elixir

My absolute favorite part of Elixir/Erlang is Binary Pattern Matching. While working on the new BLE Library for Elixir, I've had to implement a ton of protocols that are part of the Bluetooth specification. I want to take a moment to appreciate how easy it is to implement decoding/encoding of binary data in Elixir.

The BEAM marches forward

The BEAM is the virtual machine that Erlang and Elixir runs on. It is widely cited as a battle-tested piece of software though I don’t know in which wars it has seen action. It has definitely paid its dues in the telecom space as well as globally scaled projects such as Whatsapp and Discord.

Mutual TLS in Elixir: HTTPoison

Using HTTPoison to include a client certificate is mostly straightforward but there a few caveats.

Delivering social change with Elixir at Change.org

Change.org is a social change platform, with over 400 million users worldwide. Two years ago, their engineering team faced a challenge to migrate their messaging system from an external vendor to an in-house solution, to reduce costs and gain flexibility.