Codemash 2018 – Everyday Elixir

Presenter: Joel Byler

• Works at CoverMyMeds
  • Helping patients get medication they need to live
  • Work mostly in Ruby, some Elixir
  • And they’re hiring
• Why learn a new language?
  • The Pragmatic Programmer – Andrew Hunt and David Thomas
    • Invest regularly in your knowledge portfolio
      • They make an analogy to your financial portfolio
        • Diversify, and have tools so can sell those skills when they are expensive
  • Practice learning
    • The more you practice learning, the better you are at it
  • Look at problems from a different perspective
  • Maybe opens up new doors, work in different field if have the chops
• Elixir
  • The basics
    • pipe operator
      • |>
      • takes the results of a function and lets you pass that as the argument to another function
      • Elixir is functional language so passes functions around a lot
      • function() |> function2 |> function3
        • same as function3(function2(function()))
    • Pattern matching is big
      • in case statements and control statements, pattern matching is used
    • Configuration friendly to dependency injection
    • = operator is the ‘match’ operator in elixir, not assignment
• Example applications he built to learn Elixir
  • Elixir script to automate opening tabs in chrome
    • Call ‘open’ system command on mac.
  • Elixir script to screen scrape
  • A lot of built in support in Elixir
    • System libraries
    • Help structuring
  • Elixir script to search codemash topics
    • Command line
      • escript makes CLI app
  • Elixir app to track attendance at church
    • Custom web app to track attendance
      • built app in Phoenix
        • mvc framework for rails, elixir
    • Deployed to heroku, a cloud platform
  • Elixir app for point voting in an Agile process
  • Elixir app for a time-lapse camera on rasberry pi controller with a camera
    • Built on a platform called ‘nerves’