Using Macros to Handle Environment Variables in Elixir

Here on my team at Manheim, we work in three or four, or maybe five, languages. We use Ruby and Elixir for building apis, Groovy for automating Jenkins, Bash for automating anything that isn’t automated in Ruby, Elixir, or Groovy, and…

Mock Modules and Where to Find Them

TL/DR

The compile path for a mix project defaults to /lib, but you can add environment specific load paths by defining a function in your mix.exs file that takes the Mix.env as an input. Reference this function by adding a elixirc_paths…

Deploying a Plug.Router Application to Heroku

For this blog post, we’re going to start with a fresh application, keeping our focus on maintaining a deployment to Heroku. The minimum project is a simple Plug.Router app that serves a web page of some kind. So it has to run from the command line…

Pairing, Communicating, and Listening

TL/DR

Pairing effectively means pairing deliberately. Pairing deliberately is facilitated by using defined pairing styles. Three pairing styles are discussed: ping pong, strong-style, and rally-style.

No Time Not To Test

I attended a meetup recently, which featured a panel discussion with a group of local CTOs. These were CTOs of small companies, each in different industries, and the topic of discussion was development practices, how they get an idea into production.

It Takes a Nation of Millions to Lift Us Up

Today I was explaining to my son, the Highlander, how computer programming works. I started with my typical premise, which is that computers are dumb.

Listen Up

I know a lot about listening. It’s fair to say that in the population at large, I’m more aware of the labels applied to various types of listening and non-listening than most other people.

This is because I used to teach basic human communication, and most other people haven’t taken…