Since I’m relatively new to Elixir one of the ways that I learn more is by looking at the source code for dependencies that get brought in. I needed to use Mongo for a current task and I added a dependency on mongodb. This blog post goes through some initial exploration of how the mongodb library is implemented and some interesting things about Elixir.

I built a Phoenix app for my company that provides lots of administrative insight into our system. It gives operations and support folks some information beyond what’s provided in our traditional UI. It also tries to diagnose common problems and provide suggestions on how they can be fixed (or indications of what else to examine).

As someone who has some expertise in relational databases, I’m called upon to dig into problems where code is misbehaving because some code is running into some relational db data that is unexpected. Like much in life, the folks on the development side are quick to fault the database. This parallels the usual response of typical DBAs - which is to quickly fault the developers. This situation doesn’t get much better with folks who claim they are “full-stack developers”. Someone declaring that they are a “full-stack” developer is best met with a sigh at this point. Its a marketing term more than a statement of fact.

A common pattern in Ruby gem code is to have some sort of configuration file (ordinarily in YAML format) stored in a config directory of the gem. The gem then loads this with something along the lines of :

I built an administrative tool for my company that used Phoenix server side templating, bootstrap and datatables.js. This is not because I have an overwhelming preference for bootstrap or datatables.js. I just happened to find these first in the course of building the web app and they were able to solve my problem. Phoenix server-side templates are awesome, powerful and easy-to-use. I did have a bit of trouble with datatables so I figured I’d write up a brief blog post on how I got datatables to work with server-side paging.