Elixir News Brief (Q3 2021)

Honeybadger's quarterly briefings keep you up to date on the most important developments in your programming communities. We curate the news so you can spend more time focusing on what's really important.

• Events: Conferences and meetups. Upcoming and recently completed.
• Projects: News about major community projects
• Trending Topics: Summaries of the big topics everyone's talking about
• Standout Content: Content that didn't fit in other sections, but that was too cool to leave out.

Events

ElixirConf on Oct 12-15

The Elixir Community's premier conference for Elixir developers and enthusiasts from around the globe. This year ElixirConf US is bridging the gap between pre and post-pandemic conferences. ElixirConf US is being held in Austin, TX, Oct 12-13, and Online, Oct 14-15.

• Aug 17: Trainers were announced as Toran Billups, Stephen Bussey, and Bruce Tate
• Aug 13: ElixirConf US 2021 will be adding 3 virtual training classes to be held on Friday, October 8
• Aug 13: ElixirConf US 2021 will be adding 3 virtual training classes to be held on Friday, October 8
• Aug 13: 60+ Speakers were announced

Code BEAM America on Nov 3 - 5

Created by developers, Code BEAM America is dedicated to bringing the best minds in the Erlang and Elixir communities together to SHARE. LEARN. INSPIRE. Over 3 half days you will learn from 50+ cutting-edge talks and our in-depth training program, how BEAM languages are used in production and revolutionizing areas like eCommerce, Engineering, IoT, Gaming, Blockchain, Fintech, Security, Machine Learning and more!

Code BEAM will be held virtually this year

Projects

Phoenix Framework

The Phoenix Framework for Elixir enables develop[ers to build rich, interactive web applications quickly, with less code and fewer moving parts. Developers use Phoenix to craft APIs, HTML5 apps and more, for fun or at scale.

• Aug 26: Phoenix 1.6.0 is released

Oban

A persistent background job runner packed with enterprise grade features, real-time monitoring with Oban Web, and complex workflow management with Oban Pro.

• Aug 3: 2.8.0 is released

Broadway

Broadway is around since 2019 and is helping teams ingest and process data from a variety of sources like RabbitMQ, Amazon SQS, Apache Kafka, and Google Cloud PubSub.

• Aug 30: The first stable version of broadway is released!

Trending Topics

Phoenix LiveView (8)

Phoenix LiveView enables rich, real-time user experiences with server-rendered HTML. The LiveView programming model is declarative: instead of saying "once event X happens, change Y on the page", events in LiveView are regular messages which may cause changes to its stat

• Phoenix LiveView Uploads Deep Dive

  • Chris McCord
  • A step-by-step deep dive of adding LiveView uploads to the Twitter timeline clone application that we built in previous last post. Starts by covering basic server uploads, then takes it up a notch by refactoring to direct to S3 support

• LiveView Integration Tests in Elixir

  • Sophie DeBenedetto
  • In the second part of a two-part series on testing LiveView in Elixir, Sophie writes an integration test that validates interactions within a single live view, and an integration test that validates the interactions between two separate live views.

• Learnings using Phoenix LiveView for Internal Web Applications

  • Joel Kemp
  • Joel works at Spotify. His team needed an internal app built a few weeks before the launch of an important product. He shares how they decided to use Elixir and LiveView for that, and how did it go.

• Understanding LiveView Navigation

  • Joel Kemp
  • A Deep Dive into Phoenix LiveView Navigation Methods.

Testing (5)

• Cut Test Time by 80% With Development Specific Test Suites

  • Brooklin Myers
  • Brooklin explians speeding up Elixir test time!

• How to run tests in Elixir IEx shell

  • OSKAR LEGNER
  • As it turns out - it’s not really straightforward. You won’t easily find information about that in the documentation.

• Testing Phoenix and Elixir: Centralize Data Creation in the Factory

  • Brooklin Myers
  • Factories in Elixir are modules that handle inserting data into your database. By centralizing data creation in the factory, you provide a single, convenient interface where all test data is created.

• Phoenix/Elixir testing: beyond mix test

  • Brooklin Myers
  • Using commands, tags, arguments, and test watching to improve your testing experience.

Standout Content

• Elixir and Kubernetes: A love story — Part 1: Setting up an Elixir Cluster

  • David Delassus
  • This article is the first of a series of article that will cover: how to build a Kubernetes Operator in Elixir, why you don’t need leader election, out of the box distributed consensus, and how to rely on other technologies when it’s needed

• ElixirConf EU 2021

  • Michał Buszkiewicz
  • Machal gives a short write up of their ElixirConf EU experience and talks.

• Elixir Learnings

  • James Russo
  • Brex has hired and onboarded over 150 engineers to write Elixir in a production system and has over 70 elixir services running in production. Based on that context, James Russo shares some of the insights they have on how to rapidly hire and onboard Elixir engineers.