Recap: July 3, 2018 Meetup
Thanks to everyone who joined us on Tuesday! If you couldn’t make it, look for recordings soon on our Youtube channel, youtube.com/indyelixirorg.
A big thank-you to our sponsors who made tonight possible. And congrats to Jimmy, Chris, and Bethany, winners of Manning Publications’ Elixir In Action, The Little Elixir and OTP Guidebook, and the upcoming Phoenix In Action.
We kicked things off with Jared Alford sharing how his team at Sigstr uses Elixir to publish events to Apache Kafka. A challenge they faced with the kafka_ex library is that when Kafka would go down, so would kafka_ex and it would take their application down with it. His solution was a GenServer to monitor Kafka and handle downtime gracefully.
Eric Oestrich mentioned a similar challenge he faced building https://gossip.haus/ with websocket connection failures bringing down the entire supervision tree. He’s blogged recently about his “tether” solution to that problem.
Jimmy Miller gave the second talk, diving into property-based testing in Elixir with StreamData and ExUnitProperties. The Elixir core team is considering adding these to Elixir, so it was great to see how they work. Jimmy closed his talk with a rousing argument for why property-based testing matters: it aligns with the very purpose of programming which is to allow developers to think and communicate at a higher level about how the intentions and behavior of the systems we build. Onward!
Sound exciting? Our next event will be on Tuesday, September 4, 2018 We’re always looking for speakers—please reach out if you’re interested!