I've been writing Elixir at work for a few weeks. Yesterday I dove into a friend’s JS codebase and immediately got confused by the async stuff. While I used to write JS full time, the past 6 months I've spent in Elixir-land has really spoiled me.

I haven't written a lot of async/await code. It's supposed to be simpler than Promises, which are also simpler than callback-soup.

Right.

It's a bit embarrassing, but after all these years of writing JavaScript code - I still trip over async stuff. Sometimes I'm hard on myself - mostly my interior dialogue thinks: You haven't written enough JS to have it be second nature. That might be true, but there might also be more to it.

Note: This post was originally called "Why not use Elixir Streams all the time?" Half-way through the writing of that post, I started googling this question and realized that there was already some research done and I quickly got a variety of good answers. With that said, I think I'll leave this …

Today I want to share a fun refactor that finally "clicked" for me (and it was right there in plain view for quite some time!). Let me set the stage.

I get to write Elixir at my new job! This is my first time writing it in a professional setting. I have written Clojure for work and while Clojure and Elixir share quite a few similarities, I am learning lots of new things. Most of my learnings are around Elixir idioms and growing my knowledge of the concepts that the syntax of the language wraps around.

In a sense, this post is sort of a follow up to my post on side projects vs work for learning. The previous post is pretty... vague and hand-wavey, but this one will be a bit more concrete on some of the things I've learned. Let's jump into it.

Today I'm delighted to say that I've deployed Galley, making it the first project of my "4-projects-a-year" that has been completed (and with 2 weeks to spare). In this post, I'll write about why I think I was able to complete this project and about deployment. Let's start with the latter.

Oh, hello again. It's the 9th of June already. How did that happen? I'm blaming part of the haze of the last few days of a bad chest cold I got that drowned me in a sea of Nyquil + sleeping + reading.

I have until the end of June until I move on to my next project. Galley is almost done; its MVP - what remains is to set up an email system and to import some recipes. I've been putting off setting up the email system because I know it will have to cover a lot - user registration and confirmation, email and password changes, as well as other stuff I'm sure. From my brief scanning, the Elixir libraries for email management have definitely improved since I last perused them sometime in 2018.

I had a fairly productive refactoring session on a small function that I thought I would write about. In Galley, my recipe/cooking application, I have a home / index page where users can search and view recipes. At the current state, a user can search by recipe name and can filter by all recipes or their recipes. At the moment I am building out a tagging functionality such that a user can search by tags shared between recipes such as spicy, salad, or easy, for example.

With these three sources of permutation, I need to account for a database query that could have a mixed bag of search queries, tags, and filters.

It's been a busy few weeks, and I haven't had a chance to check in. We returned from Vancouver about 10 days ago and had to jump back into the work and normal life stuff without missing a beat. After that, we moved to our new apartment in Toronto. We're settling down, which means this is the end of our put-everything-in-storage-and-go-where-we-want lifestyle. For the most part, this is good, but I will miss being able to travel without burning rent.

I'm back with another post on Elixir. This one is about working with LiveView and building dynamic forms. When I talk about dynamic forms I'm referring to the ability to add or remove any number of form fields for a "embeds_many" data type. In the case of Galley, the recipe form has many parts to it, the pertinent ones here being the ingredients and the steps. Any recipe has a variable number of ingredients and instructional steps. I needed to enable users to add and/or delete form fields to fit their recipes.

This turned out to be a bit harder than I thought, as I waded into the world of LiveView and the mechanics of Ecto and Phoenix at the same time.

I'm back with a post with some thoughts on Elixir & Phoenix after using it for a few weeks. It's been really fun. I'm using Elixir & Phoenix to build "Galley," a web app for storing recipes.