Mixing a new Elixir

Wow, 1.5 years since last post passed quickly. Time to do something about it!

I’m taking part in Maciej Aniserowicz’s “Daj się poznać” contest. “Get noticed” in English. It’s a competition for programmers aiming at promoting technical blogging and building open source projects. Throughout next 12 weeks, participants have to write at least 2 blog posts each week. And at least one of them should be related to the project they’re building and hosting on github.

I’ll be writing one technical post related to the project at the beginning of week, usually around Monday or Tuesday. On Fridays I’ll be posting news and links to interesting resources in area I’ve been exploring last few months – machine learning. I’ve been thinking for a long time about some way of gathering interesting use cases, scientific papers, presentations and online courses. This way it can be beneficial to others. First round on Friday.

My project won’t make world a better place, but hopefully I will learn something. My main goal is to play around with Elixir, Phoenix (web framework) and some frontend technology (haven’t decided yet if it’s gonna be React or Elm). I will be building clone of the flightdiary.net. It’s a web app, where you can log flights you’ve taken, and you get nice map and statistics.

For start, I created repository on github, installed elixir and setup IDE with plugins. I’m using Visual Studio Code, as it became my go-to editor. I do all my F# and Javascript stuff there, and there’s also great plugin for Elixir written by Mat McLoughlin.

Then I initialised project with this simple command:

mix new flightlog

This created some files and initial project structure:

We’ll look into how it all works in next episode.

As I’m new to Elixir, I’ll need some learning. The resources I’ve been using so far are:
– This talk by Bryan Hunter
– Rob’s Connery book
– Gutek’s series of articles [Polish]

That’s it for today. See you on Friday for some ML news and next week for more Elixir!