“...I've been working since 2008 with Ruby / Ruby on Rails, love a bit of Elixir / Phoenix and learning Rust. I also poke through other people's code and make PRs for OpenSource Ruby projects that sometimes make it. Currently working for InPay...”

Rob Lacey (contact@robl.me)
Senior Software Engineer, Brighton, UK

New Project

I’m embarking on a new project this month, the plan is to have it live within the month. The purpose of the project is to learn Elixir because I want to play with new toys (ok, it’s not new anymore). I’ve found the only way to really learn is to create something, you can read a book but unless you apply your knowledge to something meaningful it’s not valuable. Not to mention that you can read all you want in a book but you never see the real world issues with your new toys unless you try something, break it, fix it, break it again. It’s like breaking in some new shoes. And then your dad goes and writes your name on them.

So, I’m passionate about music. I have a stupid sized collection of T-Shirts. I’m going to build a Band Shirt Archive. I guess a bit like the wiki part of Discogs , but first I’m going to populate it with all of my T-Shirts. Simple. A database of Artist / Band names, Photos (both stock and real life). Well, if it was Rails, I’d be up and running with a day (it would be messy) or so but I’m familiar with all of the usual suspects. ActiveRecord, AWS, file uploads with Paperclip, Authentication with Devise all that gubbins. But I need to translate all of that knowledge into a new Paradigm. Everything I’ve written in Ruby in the last 10 years has sat me squarely in the realm of ‘everything is an object’, now I need to break out and view this all through a different window.

So, gathering my tools. What do I need. I’ve got a whole host of books. I have tinkered with Phoenix a little but it was the pre-1.4 after which some things have changed, enough to warrant another edition anyway.

https://pragprog.com/titles/phoenix14/programming-phoenix-1-4/
https://pragprog.com/titles/wmecto/programming-ecto/
https://pragprog.com/titles/sbsockets/real-time-phoenix/


https://pragprog.com/titles/elixir16/programming-elixir-1-6/
https://pragprog.com/titles/cdc-elixir/learn-functional-programming-with-elixir/
https://pragprog.com/titles/lhelph/functional-web-development-with-elixir-otp-and-phoenix/

Kat also bought me Programming WebAssembly with Rust so I need to include some Rust-y experiment in here too.