Configuration has long been a hot topic in the Elixir community, and luckily, in the recent months, there has been a great deal of thoughtful work put into making this problem an easier one to solve. Today, we’re going to show you how to migrate from an Elixir application that has been configured with the widely used config/*.exs files at compile-time, to an application that instead uses environment variables for configuration and is configured at runtime.

Elixir describes itself as "a dynamic, functional programming language designed for building scalable and maintainable applications." Although it's a relative newcomer, Elixir is built on top of the functional programming language Erlang. Elixir is capable of using any Erlang library, and is ideal for use cases such as web development and distributed and low-latency systems. The power, dynamism, and feature-rich toolset of Elixir have made it somewhat of a "cult classic" among programmers.

In today’s post, we’ll learn what gRPC is, when you should reach for such a tool, and some of the pros and cons of using it. After going over an introduction of gRPC, we’ll dive right into a sample application where we’ll build an Elixir backend API powered by gRPC. Let’s jump right in!

Elixir 1.10 was recently released, and with that release came a little-known, but very interesting feature—compiler tracing. This feature means that as the Elixir compiler is compiling your code, it can emit messages whenever certain kinds of things are compiled. This ability to know what’s going on when Elixir is compiling our code might seem simple, but it actually opens up a lot of doors for opportunities to build customized compile-time tooling for Elixir applications.

Great news for all the Elixir alchemists, we’ve just released AppSignal for Elixir package version 1.12.0 which adds support for the upcoming 1.5 version of the Phoenix framework, and improves in-channel error handling. If you’re not an AppSignal user yet, make sure to check out the product tour and see how errors, performance, host metrics and triggers all come together in one tool. Phoenix 1.5 isn’t here yet, but AppSignal 1.12 is ready for it.

When requirements change for your product, there arises a need to change not only the codebase but also the existing data that already lives in production. If you’re performing the changes locally, the whole process seems fairly simple. You test your new feature against a sparkling clean database, the test suite is green, and the feature looks great. Then you deploy, and everything goes to hell because you forgot that production was in a slightly different state.

In today’s post, we’ll go over what continuous integration and continuous delivery are, the benefits that come along with employing CI/CD, and some best practices that you should follow. We’ll also explore a wide array of Elixir ecosystem tools that can help you create top-notch CI pipelines. In order to experiment with a handful of the tools that we will be discussing, we’ll use a Git hooks Elixir library to execute our CI/CD validation steps, but on our local machine.

In today’s post, we will be covering the Elixir library named Broadway. This library is maintained by the kind folks at Plataformatec and allows us to create highly concurrent data processing pipelines with relative ease. After an overview of how Broadway works and when to use it, we’ll dive into a sample project where we’ll leverage Broadway to fetch temperature data from https://openweathermap.org/ in order to find the coldest city on earth.

In this post, you’ll learn how to use ETS as a caching mechanism in your Elixir applications, get familiar with different available options, and be made aware of some things to keep in mind.

Today, we will dive into Typespecs and Behaviours. These are two Elixir features that we are ecstatic (pun intended) about. They are great examples of built-in features in Elixir that help get some of the advantages of statically typed code. Alright, let’s set the scene. Elixir is a dynamically typed language. This means that the type of each variable is not checked at compile-time, but rather at run-time. Like most things, this comes with advantages and disadvantages.