Elixir on almost done

Elixir string operations seem slow (and why it's a good thing)

hello@nietaki.com (nietaki) — Fri, 21 Apr 2023 13:00:00 +0000

I personally hate it when people post clickbait titles and take their sweet time getting to the point, so let’s do this first:

TL;DR: Some Elixir string operations, most notably String.at/2 work in linear time, as opposed to constant time, like the intuition might suggest. This is because the String module is UTF-8 aware. UTF-8 encodes characters outside of ASCII with more than one byte, so in order to find the n-th character in a string you need to process it from the beginning, you can’t just use an offset in memory.

How to use data spanning multiple data sources in Elixir

hello@nietaki.com (nietaki) — Sun, 02 Feb 2020 15:00:00 +0000

Below is a reprint of the article I wrote for the Rekki Medium page.

REKKI builds tools that help people along the restaurant supply chain do their jobs better.

We have a free mobile app that lets restaurants order and chat with suppliers, and a web-based tool for suppliers that helps them process orders, manage product codes and catalogues, and communicate more easily with their customers. The majority of REKKI’s backend is written in Elixir, working hand in hand with services written in Go and Node. The Elixir services handle most of what the user sees in the app like the real-time communication with the supplier and the status of the orders.

Trust issues: trouble in package paradise - Code BEAM STO 2019 talk

hello@nietaki.com (nietaki) — Sun, 01 Sep 2019 15:21:00 +0000

Earlier this year I gave a talk at Code BEAM STO about a proposed solution to the ever more real risk of hidden malicious code in our library dependencies. You can watch the whole thing here:

UPDATE: I have since dropped active development of the Hoplon project, but I hope something like it will become reality when the tech community is ready for it :)

String.to_existing_atom/1 is a double-edged sword

hello@nietaki.com (nietaki) — Tue, 04 Dec 2018 13:21:00 +0000

I’d argue Elixir has relatively few gotchas. It’s a simple and consistent language and when you first learn it there’s only a few things that are genuinely counter-intuitive and catch you by surprise.

One of the examples could be the difference between binaries and charlists and why iex sometimes seems to do weird things to your lists:

iex> l = [19, 7, 16, 119, 97, 116]
[19, 7, 16, 119, 97, 116]
iex> Enum.drop(l, 1)
[7, 16, 119, 97, 116]
iex> Enum.drop(l, 2)
[16, 119, 97, 116]
iex> Enum.drop(l, 3)
'wat'

One of the other ones comes when you start working with atoms and get a little too trigger-happy with them. What you could hear from your more experienced teammates is something like this:

I'm stealing API keys from your site

hello@nietaki.com (nietaki) — Sun, 02 Dec 2018 18:00:00 +0000

Earlier this year I presented my latest project - Hoplon - at the London Elixir meetup. I’m thinking of putting some more work into it over Christmas, so I figured I might gather the materials about it in one place:

Hoplon is an Elixir developer tool that helps you validate your dependencies contain no hidden malicious code. Motivated by horror stories from the JavaScript community such as this hypothetical one and this very real one.

Introducing Rexbug - tracing on the shoulders of giants

hello@nietaki.com (nietaki) — Wed, 10 Jan 2018 02:00:00 +0000

Towards the end of November I gave a flash talk at the London Elixir Meetup. This time I was talking about the journey from println debugging to proper tracing and bringing Erlang tools to Elixir programmers.

You can watch the talk here:

…and here are the slides:

The resulting Rexbug project is ready to be used but there’s still some issues I could use some help on - some should even be suitable for Elixir beginners.

Crawlie - Elixir London Meetup presentation

hello@nietaki.com (nietaki) — Sun, 09 Jul 2017 02:00:00 +0000

Last year, I saw José Valim give his keynote at the ElixirLive conference in Warsaw, where he talked about the motivation for his new Elixir libraries: GenStage and Flow. Even though I heard about those before, it was the keynote when I “got” what the libraries were good for and why they were neat - and I decided to play around with them.

Atom as an elixir IDE

hello@nietaki.com (nietaki) — Mon, 14 Nov 2016 20:58:00 +0000

July 2019 update:
#

I have since moved to neovim for all my Linux/OSX work, and I’m very happy with it. The information here is probably very outdated, but I’m leaving it here for posterity

You can see my neovim configuration in my dotfiles

Earlier this year I joined Mainframe as a backend engineer. I didn’t do any real development in elixir before and I wanted to become productive with it ASAP. When it comes to elixir there were some good books to help me understand it better, but I also needed an editor or and IDE that would give me the necessary tools without getting in my way.