Artisanal software development, quality productions and some teaching
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I've been very surprised and delighted over a number of years now by Microsoft's strong efforts in open source. I understand the skeptics, I was on Slashdot when they tried to sue Linux out of existence and I think only time will tell. I figure MS contributing is better than them hunting Linux distributions for sport…
So in my post Is this evil? I covered a way of tracking users with CSS. While thinking about those weird ways of using the web I also started thinking about pushing live data to clients without JS. Or at least maintaining a connection. So WebSockets requires JS. WebRTC requires JS. Even HLS (video streaming), which…
I’ve had Elixir on the brain recently. And by recently I probably mean 2 years. In my defense I think it is fair to say it is blooming right now. I haven’t had much need of it, or opportunity for it, in my day-to-day of maintaining a Python legacy system, renewing another legacy or optimizing Elasticsearch. So I’ve…
Elixir is the thing I do most of my public writing and speaking about. It is my default programming language for the last 5-6 years. It suits my brain. Performs well for the kind of work I typically do. And using it I have experienced very few drawbacks. Rather than writing yet another post trying to widely summarize…
One of the Erlang ecosystem's spiciest nerd snipes are hot code updates. Because it can do it. In ways that almost no other runtime can. I use Elixir which builds on Erlang and has the same capabilities.
The Lumen Project is an alternative implementation of the Erlang VM, more known as the BEAM. It is designed to work in WebAssembly with the specific goal of bringing Elixir and Erlang to the browser.
I don't think I've ever had more distrust and as a consequence distate for software than in recent years. I don't think its just me as a tech-nerd with artisanal tech-carpentry aspirations. I want people to build well, treat their users right and generally exercise some actual restraint. I see it very clearly and I…
Underjord is an artisanal consultancy doing consulting in Elixir, Nerves with an accidental speciality in marketing and outreach. If you like the writing you should really try the pro version .
So I've been curious about what kinds of displays you can connect to the Pi-series single board computers for a while. I happened to accidentally order a few. Among others an eInk display. I ordered the PaPiRus ePaper. It ended up being dead on arrival and then out of stock so I received an Inky to replace it. Fair…
The nine nines. 99.9999999% of uptime. Whether the AXD301 actually deserves to be held up as a system of nine nines seems debatable. I am not particularly interested in that debate. Erlang has a strong record for reliability and a design intended to help you as a developer and operator achieve your nines. Maybe just…
I was a Python developer for some time and one great joy of Python is that you have an expressive language that you can use for your serious apps as well as for your hacky little one-off script or bespoke pieces of automation. By expressive I mean that typing very little can give you a lot of progress towards your…
This is about a reaction I noticed with myself in response to membership programs, patreons and individual sponsorship as I've run into significantly more of these following Corona. The advertising-supported model has confirmed many of the concerns about its sustainability and creators are looking for more reliable…
I try to be a friendly citizen of the web. I try to keep my site in good shape. It should load quickly, track nothing beyond your basic server logs, not hassle you about cookies, GDPR or my newsletter. I do have a newsletter but it won't pop up in your face here. I try to stay firmly on the side of friendly and a good…
I've worked with a number of clients on Elixir projects and I've onboarded myself, I've been onboarded and I've onboarded others. And compared to my experiences with PHP/Python/Javascript and my limited experience with C#/.Net I have experienced quite a difference.
Elixir supports the usual supects of observability. Open Telemetry (OTel), log handlers, capturing metrics. And it does it well. This post will mostly focus on the observability you have on the BEAM that is either incredibly rare to see elsewhere or possibly entirely unique.
Another question might be; why do machine learning at all? I'm not big into ML/AI though I've been poking it more recently as the open models, such as Stable Diffusion and the more practical Whisper, caught my curiosity. I have a very decent GPU (3090 Ti) and I've poked around a bit. I don't consider ML a super…
Speculations and specifications. If you were a Winamp user back in the day, or curate an MP3 collection currently, you might recognize the humble ID3 tag. It is what the metadata in the MP3 file is made up of. First it was pretty limited in the version later dubbed ID3v1. Like any good 2.0 they added a ton more…
I adore Nerves. I recently joined the core team. And I'll be doing my best to help people get along with this lovely way to co-mingle hardware and massively concurrent reliable software.
Elixir was built on Erlang. Erlang was built to provide "consistently low latency" and a few other audacious goals. Note, this is not a hard realtime constraint. It is soft, squishy and yet, important and real. It makes Erlang unusually suitable to systems where latency matters and where a near-realtime experience is…
I like production gear. Audio, video and .. miscellaneous. I like things that seem like they'll make me oh-so-very productive. I'm a sucker prosumer as a hobby. Let's talk about Elgato, Elixir and why I never actually get anything done. This is unfortunately not sponsored by a prosumer brand, or anyone, that'd have…
Elixir is a language with syntactical roots in Ruby. It also carries the Erlang legacy. Legacy used here as in "a great legacy" and not as in "system you don't like anymore". Ruby is an object-oriented language. Elixir is functional language. The Erlang part has an impact as Elixir was designed to provide strong…
I did a livestream where I talked about Object Storage. The how and why. The Bad Old Days. And also the neat and interesting stuff just beyond the basics. I figured I'd cover that in text as well.
I've been using Elm since about one year back now. At the start of 2021 I began working with a client that had an existing Elm frontend code base and an early stage backend built in Elixir and Phoenix. This post will be about my experiences running face first into Elm. I'll be vague on some details as I can't share…