Hey Indy Elixirists! You may notice some changes up in the IndyElixir.org header. Here’s what’s up:
📅 We’re Moving from Meetup.com to MeetingPlace.io
The MeetingPlace platform has some extra features we’re excited about (like better support for remote meetups), and best of all it’s built right here in Indy by our friend Chris Achard!
💬 Chat Has Mostly Been Happening on Slack instead of Flowdock
We’ve long had a chat room on the Flowdock platform (thanks IndyHackers for setting us up!). For a while, it was even home to our chat bot Elix. But times change, the broader IndyHackers community has largely migrated to Slack, and for many months the #indy-elixir Slack channel has had a lot more activity than our Flowdock flow. So, we’re saying farewell to Flowdock and centralizing conversation in Slack. If you haven’t already, you can join the wonderful IndyHackers Slack community at the link below, and join us in the #indy-elixir channel. See you there!
We’ve been on a bit of a break, but everyone being stuck as home was just the nudge we needed to get back together for a remote meetup!
Thank you to our sponsors for making tonight’s meetup possible. And congrats to David, Kevin, and Nathan, winners of Manning Publications’ The Little Elixir & OTP Guidebook, Elixir In Action, and Phoenix In Action. As a reminder, you can use our group’s discount code—ug367—on manning.com for 36% off their books on Elixir and other topics.
Mitchell Hanberg returned to walk us through setting up automatuc deployments for Elixir applications using Github Actions, the Gigalixir hosting platform, and his own gigalixir-action. Watch the talk below or follow along with the companion blog post.
Our next (likely remote) event will be on Tuesday, June 2, 2020 Intereted in speaking? Please reach out!
Thanks as always to our sponsors for making tonight’s meetup possible. And congrats to Waseem and Garrett, winners of Manning Publications’ action-packed Elixir In Action and Phoenix In Action. As a reminder, you can use our group’s discount code—ug367—on manning.com for 36% off their books on Elixir and other topics.
This evening’s talks focused on Phoenix LiveView, a new library from the Phoenix team that lets you build rich, interactive user interfaces without custom JavaScipt.
Mitch Hanberg started us off with a talk about refactoring an interface component from JavaScript/AJAX to LiveView to enable real-time updates. The end result required less code and was easier to reason about, too!
Eric Oestrich shared how he used both LiveView and Phoenix Channels to create a live-updating “Player Count” widget on grapevine.haus that updates all connected clients when the count changes. Check out his live stream to watch Eric build it.
Finally, we had some great discussion after the talks. Mitch shared some current work on an HTML DSL in Elixir. He came with a question for the group, but taught many of us a lesson in metaprogramming as we talked through it.
Our next event will be on Tuesday, July 2, 2019 We’re always looking for speakers—please reach out if you’re interested!
Thank you to our sponsors for making tonight’s meetup possible. And congrats to Jared, Eric, and Dave, winners of Manning Publications’ Elixir In Action, The Little Elixir and OTP Guidebook, and Phoenix In Action. Remember you can always use our group’s discount code—ug367—on manning.com for 36% off their books on Elixir and other topics.
Tonight’s event was an Elixir Open Mic Night. Eric started things off, having just returned from Lonestar Elixir Conf (see his talk here). Eric recently introduced some big changes to his Grapevine game network, most notably a web client where you can play games from across the network without leaving your browser! Eric and his company SmartLogic have also been producing content, including a fantastic Elixir podcast (featuring some familiar Indy Elixir faces) and an Elixir coding live stream (recordings here).
Jared shared a new library he found, wormhole, that runs a function, traps any errors, and returns a status—handy when you don’t want to risk a process dying and losing its state while processing unknown data.
Finally, we wrapped up with an Exercism.io exercise appropriately titled “Meetup” about calculating meetup dates given a schedule like “second Monday” or “Wednesteenth” (the only Wednesday ending in “-teenth”). See our solution here. It was fun to workshop, even if it could have been simpler if we’d used the recently-added Calendar module. This bit was my favorite:
defpok!({:ok,value}),do:value
We wanted to call it 🆗, but were surprised (given Elixir’s excellent Unicode support) that emoji in function names won’t compile. 🤷♂️
Our next event will be on Tuesday, May 7, 2019 We’re always looking for speakers—please reach out if you’re interested!
Happy New Year! Thanks to everyone who joined us for our first meetup of 2019. If you couldn’t make it in person, you can find recordings of most of our events on our Youtube channel, youtube.com/indyelixirorg.
A big thank you to our sponsors for their continued support in making Indy Elixir possible. Congrats to Andrew, Chris, and Michael, winners of Manning Publications’ Elixir In Action, The Little Elixir and OTP Guidebook, and Phoenix In Action. Remember you can always use our group’s discount code—ug367—on manning.com for 36% off their books on Elixir and other topics.
Ryan Billingsley shared how Clustertruck uses Elixir to power their new Clustertruck for Teams Slack integration. He covered the architecture of a Slack integration, declaring business logic with the Opus library, and complications with Slack deprecating a core API.
Eric Oestrich delved into websockets, particularly how his Gossip game chat network and Grapevine player portal power cross-game communication across a network of games running on the ExVenture framework.
Our next event will be on Tuesday, March 5, 2019 We’re always looking for speakers—please reach out if you’re interested!
