Or, “Why Nathan hates figs” — ONE “We had a fig tree growing up. But we could never pick them fast enough.”

Because we needed some more resources for this. — Recently our team has been transitioning to a more microservice ecosystem. To maintain our data integrity, we decided to assign UUIDs as primary keys for the resources we’re creating in our newest application, so that other apps can have a static reference point for the data they’re receiving from us. …

How spies and Elixir handle the unexpected — In From Ruby with Love, we visualized processes in Elixir as individual spies completing missions. We ended with an open question: what happens when a process fails? Thankfully, we can again find our analog in the spy world. First, let’s look at two more aspects of Erlang and Elixir: Linking…

How an OO developer visualizes processes in Elixir — From OO to Elixir When you’re coming from OO to Elixir, you hear about “parallelism” and “fault tolerance” and how great they are. You learn that these things are made possible through functional programming and OTP. And so when you start coding in it, you parrot these things back to people who ask you…

Come for the explainer, stay for the poetry — We recently replaced a hand-rolled test controller with Mox for testing in our umbrella app (how and why are detailed in “Elixir Test Mocking with Mox”). …

Giving access to Learn.co tools through LTI — Flatiron School’s Learn.co platform has some amazing features for students as they progress through our web dev and data science curriculums. We have the in-browser IDE, instant indicators for passing/failing tests, and interactive Jupyter notebooks. Understandably, these are features attractive to many other types of curriculum. Our current challenge is…

If we want to use the popular messaging system Kafka with our Elixir projects, we have a few wrappers we can choose from. This blog post covers integrating one of them, Kaffe, which proved difficult to troubleshoot because of results like this:

A day in the life of a programmer — On a Good Day, we visualize a task and we accomplish it.