In the first part of this series, we explored the ins and outs of Elixir test factories and fixtures. However, test factories bypass the rules of your Elixir application. Let's turn our attention to how we can avoid this by using data generation functions. Let's dive straight in!
Writing tests is an essential part of any Elixir developer's routine. We're constantly chasing knowledge on how to write better tests, improving their speed and readability. In this three-part series, we'll explore test data generation in Elixir. Whether you are a mid-level or senior-level Elixir developer, this series will provide valuable insights to help improve the testing process for your projects.
Instrumentation is an essential part of monitoring and operating an application, especially for apps heavily used in production. Even in today's everchanging technology landscape, visibility and observability still challenge developers and system administrators. Metrics and logging are essential for monitoring and operating an application. Metrics measure an application's performance and system health, while logging records system health and application state.
In part one of this series, the debugging tools we used — Elixir's IO.inspect/2, IEx.pry, and dbg/2 — required us to insert changes into code directly. Outside the development environment, you probably won't (and shouldn't) have access to your code. Erlang has a few tools to debug code at runtime: :debugger, :dbg.tracer, and :observer. First, let's look at the:debugger, a graphical debugging tool. Let's get going!
In an Elixir application, you might need to access certain data frequently, which can be costly. The access time involved in retrieving data at every step can cause high latency, or even make the application crash (due to an increased workload on the database). Caching is the best technique to store the most frequently accessed data and minimize database data retrieval, improving the overall performance of the application.
Changes in the upcoming Phoenix 1.7 release have led us to re-think how AppSignal for Phoenix works. AppSignal for Phoenix version 2.2.0 introduces our changes to make upgrading to Phoenix 1.7 easier. In this blog post, we'll outline what's changed and why.
Welcome to part one of this two-part series on debugging in Elixir and Erlang. In this post, we'll use several different tools and techniques to debug Elixir code. First, we'll get to know the demo project I created to showcase certain tools: dist_messenger. It's an Elixir project of a distributed messaging system that can be used directly on IEx. It allows users in different nodes to send and receive messages to each other.
In our last post, we wrote a basic parser for phone numbers using Elixir. It was a bit simplistic since it didn't really respect the format phone numbers are expected to have, but it was a great start. We'll now improve the parser to ensure we only accept phone numbers that fit the spec and make our return type an instance of structured data. Let's dive straight in!
In this post, we'll use two of Elixir's most powerful features - pattern matching and recursion - to sanitize a string by removing invalid Unicode "Specials" characters. Let's dive straight in!
The need to manipulate strings comes up quite often, whether it's to validate user-provided values or transform text into structured data that can be used programmatically. Most often, we'll reach for regular expressions to accomplish this task, but sometimes there's a better solution to the problem: parser combinators. In this two-part article, we'll explore how they work. Before moving on, let's define what 'parsing' is: Source: Wikipedia.
