How to Write Well — How to be a successful technical writer in your everyday life as a dev and beyond. In Part I of this two-part series, you saw the many types of technical writing that show up in your day-to-day life as an engineer. Here’s Part I, in case you want to start there: Technical Writing: Your Engineering Superpower What Is Technical Writing?medium.com You saw also why technical writing plays an important role in your work. In Part…

What Is Technical Writing? — You’re already a technical writer, so learn how to do it well and unlock your engineering superpower! The phrase “technical writing” usually brings a few things to mind — in particular technical blogs and programming books. But your everyday life as a developer is actually full of technical writing. Every time you open a pull request, write a GitHub issue or Jira ticket, author a technical design…

How to DRY up your modules with for, for_each, and zipmap — We know we can define a Terraform module that produces output for another module to use as input. But how can we build dynamic output from a module that creates a set resources, and format that output just right to act as input elsewhere? It’s possible with the help of…

Building RPC Features with Railway In a previous post, we introduced the Railway family of libraries for building messaging patterns between applications on our Learn.co ecosystem. We saw how these tools allowed us build robust async messaging systems in Elixir and Ruby with very little hand-rolled code. …

Ruby and Elixir Packages for Inter-App Communication — You Want IPC IPC, which stands for Inter-Process Communication, is something you want if you can answer “yes” to any of these questions: Does your organization support multiple applications? Does your organization have multiple business domains that your engineering team is tasked with supporting? Is it difficult to coordinate engineering work across these…

Elixir has become famous as the shiny new “concurrent” programming language, with more and more former OO devotees flocking to it every day. But what actually makes Elixir concurrent? To find out, we need to understand OTP and the Erlang VM. I Don’t Understand Concurrency Coming to Elixir from a Ruby and JS background…

Building an api client mock and learning to love mocks-as-nouns — Why We Need Mox In a recent post, we talked about the age-old question: How can you test code that relies on external services, like an API? …

What should you do when testing Elixir code that makes web requests to an external API? We don’t want to let our code make those requests during a test run — we’ll slow down our tests and potentially use up API rate limits. We could mock such requests with the…

What to do when you can’t mix ecto.migrate — This post was originally published on Sophie’s blog, The Great Code Adventure. You need to run your migrations with the production release of your Elixir app in your production environment. You can’t use mix! You can use Ecto Migrator. …