elixir Archives - Michael Bianco

Learning Elixir and Ecto

I’m finally posting a long-running learning document that I wrote as I I continued work on my original Elixir side project. I stopped working on this for at least a year and recently picked it back up as part of exploring some technologies for my next startup. This post got way longer than I expected, but hopefully, it’s a great compendium of notes and learnings from someone trying to learn Elixir who has a strong understanding of ruby, python, javascript, etc. What I’m learning Here’s what I’m going to be learning: How does Ecto work? Supervisor, tasks, processes, etc. "Let it Crash" philosophy. What exactly does this mean in practice?..

Automating Elixir Package Deployment with GitHub Actions

I enjoy Elixir, although I know it doesn’t make sense to use it for most production applications. However, I try to use it for side projects when I can, even just because it’s such a fun and beautiful language to program in. One thing I’ve been fascinated with recently is automating the entire release process for packages using conventional commits with GitHub actions. This post walks through how to make that happen, and some other bits around Elixir project setup. Here’s the example project with all of the learnings from this post in place…

Executing Multiple SQL Statements in Elixir

Working with raw SQL in the Elixir/Ecto world is not easy. I thought executing a multi-line SQL file in a database migration would be easy; it’s not. Here’s what I learned: The execute function does not support executing multiple statements at once. It’s perplexing that there’s no direct solution for this in Elixir. While AyeSQL claims raw SQL support, it mandates a one-statement-at-a-time approach. This limitation is particularly problematic when importing SQL designed to create triggers spanning multiple lines. For simple SQL tasks, you might consider splitting the raw SQL into multiple lines: But only if your SQL is well-formed and relatively simple…

Tag: elixir