Perplexinomicom

Preparing to refactor with better Unit Tests

TL/DR: The last time we looked at this code, we wrote property tests. The property tests used generators to create input, but the actually testing of the invariants was just regular Elixir code. In this post, we’ll look at rewriting those property…

Preparing to Refactor with Property Tests

TL/DR

If you can think in properties, with or without a property testing library, your tests will support refactoring rather than being a barrier to it.

A Function of Parts

I recently lost my full time job. I’m working as a contractor, but one of the things about my life is that I’m legally obligated to have health insurance at all times, so I’m looking for a new full time job, which means I’m also looking at old code that I have hanging around on Github to see…

A Tale of Graphs and Darkness

TL/DR

1. Review of the previous two posts.
2. Small world networks have short distances between similarly connected nodes.
3. You can extract a small world of data from a small world network with a…

Just the ‘T’ from ‘ETL’

Introduction

This is part 1 of a 2 part series in an N part series about about microservices. Our overall goal is to create three microservices with related data, host them on Heroku, and then look at strategies for coordinating those services.

The Kevin Bacon Problem

TL/DR

1. Download compressed .tsv files
2. Import tsv files into postgres database
3. Create phoenix.ecto project
4. Connect project to tables from import step

Elixir for the Little Things

A lot of blog posts, videos, books, and tutorials about programming Elixir tend to focus on the big things: web apps, web apps with Plug, web apps with Phoenix, web apps that need to handle 80 million concurrent requests, web apps that need to be web scale, big things. Big…

In Defense (sort of) of Side Projects

About two months ago, I got into a minor twitter war with a coding celebrity of some stature over the nature and neccessity of side projects. At issue was the question of whether developers should have some sort of “Side Projects” that they work on, some…