Learning Archives - Page 4 of 4

Building a Elixir & Phoenix Application

Learning Elixir Ever since I ran into Elixir/Phoenix through a couple of popular Hacker News posts I’ve been interested in tinkering with the language. I have a little idea for an app that I’m just motivated enough to build that Elixir would work for. I’ve document my learning process below by logging my thoughts as I learned Elixir via a ‘learning project’. What I’m building Here’s what I’d like to build: Web app which detects the user’s location using the built-in location service in the browser The zip code of that location is determined (server or client-side) The zip code is handed off to a server-side process which renders a page with the zip code…

Using Ansible to Deploy Elixir Applications on Dokku

For me, the best (and most fun!) way to learn is to find a problem with a new set of tools you want to learn. I’ve documented my process of learning Ansible below, I hope it’s interesting to others! Motivation I built an application with Elixir and Phoenix and deployed it using Gigalixir. Gigalixir worked well, but after a couple of weeks the site shut down due to a lack of updates (I was on the free tier). Since this project is strictly for learning, I figured it would be fun to learn Ansible and save a couple bucks by signing up for a free VPS service. I initially chose Vultr because they offered $50 of free credit towards a $3.50/month VPS, which should be more than enough for a year…

Running Tests Against Multiple Ruby Versions Using CircleCI

I’ve been a long-term maintainer of the NetSuite ruby gem. Part of maintaining any library is automated tests against multiple versions of various dependencies. Most of the time, this is limited to the language version, but can include other dependencies as well. Recently my build config stopped working as CircleCI upgraded to V2 of their infrastructure. I found it challenging to find an example CircleCI V2 config with the following characteristics: No Gemfile.lock and therefore no caching of gems. When you are testing across ruby versions you can’t use a single Gemfile.lock. No rails, no databases, just plain ruby Here’s an heavily documented CircleCI config that tests multiple ruby versions:

Time Machine Backups with a Raspberry Pi and External Drives

As I was reviewing my backup strategy, I realized I hadn’t completed a Time Machine backup on my machines in a long time. Plugging in the drive was just enough friction to forget doing it completely. The Airport Express has a USB port to plug hard drives, printers, etc into. These devices would be magically broadcasted to the network. It was awesome, and then Apple killed the device. The Eero I upgraded to is great, but the USB port is useless. But, there’s silver lining! I’ve been looking for a good excuse to buy a Raspberry Pi and mounting external hard drives on the network fit the bill! $35 for a tiny computer more powerful that anything I had growing up and more powerful than a $5 DigitalOcean or AWS VPS. What’s not to like?..

Category: Learning