In this post I will try and explain how pattern matching and recursion work in Elixir with some (hopefully) simple examples. I’m not going go into the ‘why’, for that, there are many people better qualified than me to explain. What I hope to acheive is a …
Continue Reading →I've been talking a lot recently with colleagues (and anyone foolish enough to ask) about the benefits of Elixir, based on the performance of the underlying Erlang Virtual Machine (BEAM). One of the things I'm most impressed with is the ability to utilize…
Continue Reading →Today I saw someone in a Slack discussing a website that blocked pasting. This led to me wanting to share some thoughts on the topic of user experience (UX) and security. Why does (product / service) stop me from pasting? The only real argument that I he…
Continue Reading →Erlang comes with an awesome tool called observer, which is readily available to the Elixir user. If you want to use it, simple run :observer.start from an IEx session. An interesting feature is that you can then connect to another node and observer its d…
Continue Reading →I have been really interested in the discussions in the Rails and Ember communities on the topic of Lightning Deploys. Here are some things I've tried, failed, learned and succeeded with! What's a lightning deploy anyway? One of the issues that many folk…
Continue Reading →Why a custom Mix task? I love the built in support for seeds with Phoenix, but sometimes I don't want to programatically generate a bunch of stuff, sometimes I just want to initalize the database in a known state. This is particularly useful for things t…
Continue Reading →So a topic that often comes up for folks new to Ember is Ember Data. There's a whole bunch of fear around the topic and Ember Data (ED) is frequently maligned. I hope that I can provide some insight into the way ED works, particularly when you have an AP…
Continue Reading →What even is mentorship? Let me start by clarifying some things. Mentorship is not: A manager / subordinate relationship A teacher / student relationship An experienced person telling a less experienced person what to do A disciplinary / punitive process…
Continue Reading →I read this quote on Twitter from Avdi Grimm today and it really resonated with me People don't tell singers "you are not your songs", or artists "you are not your paintings". #iammycode— Avdi Grimm (@avdi) May 20, 2015 This…
Continue Reading →Fasting, compassion and evidence As clinicians we are often expected to follow practices that are 'known' to be beneficial. It is widely expected by the public that what we say is based on evidence and is indeed 'best'. It has long been considered good p…
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